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Glacial Cataclysm

Last Updated

July 2008

Compiled By Glen W. Chapman Chapman Research Group

From Various Sources 1.(Compiled from Book Cataclysm By D.S. Allan &amp; J. B. Delair, 1997 ) There is absolutely no doubt that the stupendous natural forces connected with mountain-building (orogeny) are closely related to large-scale deformation of the Earth's Crust, and that many of the world's highest ranges originated in and even attained their present elevations during crustily disturbances that signaled the end of Pleistocene times. Varying amounts of increasing elevation occurred sporadically down to the close of the Pleistocene. We do urge, however, that a high percentage of today's major ranges rose to their present heights only at the end of, or after, Pleistocene times. Before then, as demonstrated by numerous geological facts and observations, mountains were mostly of very modest elevation. Evidence supporting that contention is both widespread and convincing. The geological modernity of folded mountains in many parts of Asia was recognized early this century by Dr Bailey Willis when he wrote how they &quot;challenge credulity by their extreme youth&quot; His conclusions were confirmed by studies of mountain ranges in China, where huge uplifts of the Earth's crust were found to have occurred since the glacial period. Similar youthfulness characterizes the ranges bordering the western Gobi desert, including all those from the Russian Altai mountains to the lien Shan range'. Indeed, it has been said of this region that: The present Gobi basin is relatively young, and was formed coincidentally with the uplift of the Trarisbaikal ranges.' Certainly within human memory a large inland sea, referred to in ancient Chinese records as the `Great Han Hai', occupied the Gobi basin. This apparently extended from the Great Khingan Shan in the east to the Tien Shan and Pamir ranges in the west, a distance of some 2,000 miles (3,200km), and from north to south a distance of some 700 miles (1,120km). Its volume was accordingly immense. At the time of the sea's existence, the entire basin apparently lay from two to three thousand feet (600 to 900m) lower than it does today, and there is every indication that it was uplifted simultaneously not only with the Pamirs and great ranges of western China but also with the Tibetan plateau immediately to the south. The draining away of the water constituting this inland sea must have been a truly devastating event. The same upheaval affected the mountainous region of northern China too, where huge lava outpourings occurred on the Great Khingan Shan'. Not improbably these events were concurrent with the similarly large basaltic flows on the neighboring Sikhote-Alin range, and with the spectacular collapse of the sea floor by many thousands of metres, along the eastern shoreline of the present Kamchatka peninsula, all the way south to the islands of Japa&amp;. The Bayan Kara Shan range in western China was up heaved some 6,500ft (2,000m), while Minya Konka, one of the world's highest peaks, was uplifted 3,250ft (1,000m), more or less coincidentally with the elevations of the ranges in Yunnan Province by at least 6,500ft (2,000m)'~'. Southwards, the Tibetan Plateau was elevated by a still greater amount -- 9,750ft (3,000m). Opinions differ whether this took place in early'32 or late'33 Pleistocene times -- but as this uplift is known to have been coincident with the elevation of the Himalayas to their present height, which,

according to FlintiM and others, occurred at or just after the end of Pleistocene times, we are probably justified in ascribing a like date to the Tibetan disturbances too. Flint linked this Himalayan uprise with the formation of other major Earth features thus: &quot;Late Pleistocene uplift occurred in the Himalayan region and in the Alps, and large scale rift rig took place in eastern Africa&quot;. Among other ranges affected then were &quot;the Cordilleran systems in both North and South,America, the Caucasus, and many others&quot;. Wadia confirmed this with regard to Himalayan orogeny when he wrote: Evidence of the extreme youth of Himalayan orogeny has multiplied of recent years. The tilting and elevation of the Pleistocene lake and river deposits of the Kashmir valley (Karewa series) containing fossil plants and vertebrates, to a height of 5,000--6,000ft; the dissection of river terraces containing post-Tertiary mammalia to a depth of over 3,000ft and the over-thrusting of the older Himalayan rocks upon Pleistocene gravel and alluvia of the plains have been noted by the Geological Survey of India and other observers. Astonishing as it may seem, this over-thrusting of older upon newer formations was attended by the dragging-up by more than 5,000ft (1,500m) of marine beds containing palaeolithic remains in Kashmir, and occurred during the age of humanity. The Indian geologist M S Krishnart traced cvi dence for an extraordinarily massive uplift of the Pir Panjal mountains, also in Kashmii which attained an even greater elevation. He noted: The last stage of the uplift, which must have been of the order of 6,000ft, is believed to have occurred since the advent of early man. This upheaval has not only elevated the Pir Panjal and folded and tilted the Karewas, but has also affected the rocks of the Potwar and the Salt range. Not only were the Himalayas and their satellite ranges affected by this gigantic crustal uplift, but so also were the Pamirs, the Hindu Kush, Karakoram and Kailas ranges, the Kun-lun mountains and the Altai and Tien Shan ranges, all of which rose to their present altitudes geologically very recently141. After detailed studies of the Nanga-Parbat massif in the western Himalayas, Dr P Finsterwalder concluded that its uprise was immediately post-glacial. Such crustal movements understandably affected local natural drainage, rivers there exhibiting repeated proofs of rejuvenation due to uplifted watersheds. The course of the Narbada River, which has been changed by &quot;late earth movements&quot;, is a fine instance of this, while the precipitous waterfalls at Jabalpur owe their present spectacular image to the same cause. Comparably vast changes in the elevations of hills and mountains and of a reorganized water pattern took place about the same time in Burma and undoubtedly extended to northern Thailand, Laos and parts of Vietnam as far south as Malaya. Upraised beaches along the latter's coast show: ...a recession of the sea and a lowering of sea level of at least 5Oft... There is evidence that the sea level has fallen more than 300ft, in the area including Mt Ophir and Kedah Peak, since, or during, Pleistocene times. Might not the elevation of these beaches have resulted as much from an uprise of the land as from a drop in sea level? Such an explanation would accord with Umbgrove's statement that: Should one, nevertheless, cling to the theory of submerged continents, the only alternative would be to assume that while vast blocks were being submerged in one area, parts of the ocean floor of almost identical size were being elevated in others. Before that date it was markedly different.

Much the same can be said of the present Alpine scenery in Europe. Not so long ago, geologically speaking, they were little more than a chain of low hills', but, judging from the under-cited remarks of Dr Reginald Daly of Harvard, the processes by which they acquired their present character involved a truly appalling paroxysm of Nature. During the building of the Alps gigantic slabs of rock, thousands of feet thick, hundreds of miles long and tens of miles wide, were thrust up and then over, relatively to the rocks beneath. The direction of the relative over-thrusting movement was from Africa towards the main mass of Europe to the north. The visible rocks of the northern Alps of Switzerland have thus been shoved northwards distances in the order of 100 miles. In a sense the Alps used to be on the present site of northern Italy. In effect, the present Alps represent a crustal shortening of &quot;about 100km&quot; , which some authorities have suggested was as much as 600km. This was caused by a variety of interrelated processes including massive over-thrusting of older upon younger strata analogous to that previously noted in the Himalayas. Over-thrusting on a grand scale is common for instance in the Jura mountains, while that in the Glarus mountains of east Switzerland is traceable for many miles and is a showpiece of Alpine geology1M. The Silbern and Glarnisch peaks are arresting examples of strata! inversion, and the Roggenstock, the Mönch and the mighty Jungfrau not less so. Although various explanations of the precise modus operandi of these processes have been proposed from time to time, their cause and development are still imperfectly understood. Erich Haarmann advocated that the great rock masses were forced to slide over one another by their own tremendous weight, but the role played in this process by plutonic melts (layers of molten rocks formed deep within the Earth), such as would permit this, has yet to be clarified. Nonetheless Haarmann's hypothesis is perhaps still the most attractive of those available. Certainly the juggernaut-like progress of billions of tonnes of rock over surface strata, crushing and obliterating everything in its path is almost unimaginable. Prof Oswald Heer associated this convulsion with the &quot;glacial epoch&quot;during late Pleistocene times. Today, the summits of three of the highest Alpine peaks, Mt Blanc, Monte Rosa and the Matterhorn, respectively stand 15,781ft (4,856m), 15,217ft (4,682m) and 14,691ft (4,520m) above sea level. If we assume the description of the proto-Alps as &quot;low hills&quot; to signify no more than say 2,000ft (600m), the uprise involved must have been as much as 12,000--13,000ft (3,700--4,000m). A stratal uplift of this magnitude is positively staggering, while the heat generated by the physical over-thrusting and inversion of such gigantic rocky masses must have been appalling. It is unnecessary here to review all the great mountain systems of the world. We may pass on to consider just a few outstanding examples from Africa and the Americas, merely pausing en route to note that the elevation of the Norwegian mountains, with their fjords -- of which more shortly -- is thought to have been late glacial or even post-glacial. Almost certainly the orogeny just discussed was coeval with crustal dislocations along the north-west African coast and in the adjacent Atlas mountains. The latter, in particular the AntiAtlas, formerly extended into the present Atlantic Ocean at least as far as the Canary Islands. The subsidence of this earlier westerly prolongation of Africa, marked by gross local distortions of strata, occurred in late Pleistocene or earliest Holocene times. Significantly, coincidental with this subsidence, the Hoggar (Ahaggar) and AIr regions of the Sahara far to the south-east were evidently in the process of being abruptly upheaved Unquestionably, these elevatory and depressive crustal movements, the emptying in some localities of lakes and inland seas and the creation and enlarging of rivers elsewhere were intimately connected with huge tectonic disturbances of the kind that produced the Great Rift Valley of east Africa, a feature commonly assigned to late glacial (Pleistocene) times. These geophysical changes find almost exactly similar parallels in the Americas. Referring to

the western Cordilleras of North America, Daly remarked:

. .the whole Rocky Mountain front, for hundreds of miles, has been pushed up and then out, many miles over the plains. Writing specifically of Chief Mountain in Montana, he noted how it was: ...thrust bodily upon much younger strata of the Great Plains, and then driven over them eastwards, for a distance of at least eight miles. Indeed, the thrust may have been several times eight miles.' Such crustal dislocations embraced enormous areas and titanic tonnage. For example: `~All of the Glacier National Park in Montana and all the Rocky Mountain area up to the Yellowhead Pass in Alberta&quot; was moved laterally for many miles These mountains therefore, afford strident echoes of the situation already recorded in the Alps and Himalayas and it is certainly no surprise to find Forrest adding: There is a good body of evidence, that the elevation of the western part of North America (like that of Norway) was postglacial or late glacia1.. Considering the Coast Ranges of southern California, another authority observed: &quot;There, within the short limits of the Pleistocene Epoch, strata a mile thick were deposited&quot; ~. These were later intensely eroded and deformed, being &quot;...finally... uplifted a quarter of a mile above the sea -- the last episode is demonstrated by a flight of marine terraces which marches like a cyclopean stairway up the seaward slope of some parts of the range&quot; . This rate of deposition (not to mention the degree of crustal uplift itself of late or postglacial age) hugely transcended the norm demanded by Lyell's gradualism, as also did the geologically very recent and cataclysmic stratal contortion and upheaval, by at least 6,500ft (2,000m), of the Cascade Mountains and the Sierra Nevada in Oregon and eastern California. South of the Equator, the mighty Andes everywhere exhibit signs of extreme youthfulness. The longest continuous range on Earth, the Andes are actually very ancient mountains which only acquired their present striking relief at the end of Pleistocene times. This has been described as geologically very rapid and attended by intense volcanism, several of the volcanoes attaining enormous heights. The Andean uplift was immense, with mountain passes in Peru and Bolivia often lying as much as 13,000ft (4,000m) above sea level. Everywhere the rugged and jagged profiles of the Andean peaks bespeak of violent, catastrophic formation. Confronting us at almost every turn are abundant, indisputable and tellingly consistent evidences of a geologically recent, worldwide orogeny characterized by crustal dislocations, upthrusts and faulting on a a gargantuan scale. Recognition of the truly global dimensions of this mountain-building has been long voiced by geophysicists. Reviewing mountains generally, Dr Walter Bucher of Columbia University has observed: Taken in their entirety, the orogenic belts are the result of worldwide stresses that have acted on the crust as a whole. Certainly the pattern of these belts is not what one would expect from wholly independent, purely local changes in the crust&quot;. A possibly even greater authority, Vening Meinesz, asserted that:

&quot;If we examine the pattern of great geosynclines [large geological troughs] over the Earth's surface, we cannot doubt that their cause must have a worldwide character&quot;. Commenting upon the same phenomena, Dr J H F Umbgrove admitted &quot;1 feel there is overwhelming evidence that the movements are the expression of a worldwide, active and deep-seated cause.. A very large number of similar opinions could be cited, together with a large array of varying hypotheses explaining the causes of orogeny. It is, unnecessary to indulge in this here, although we would again emphasise the general agreement that some worldwide cause was responsible for the phenomena just discussed. Suffice it to observe that something acting on a planetary scale and with staggering power was basically responsible for these titanic crustal disturbances in times geologically very recent, described by one writer as: &quot;A remarkable and stupendous period -- a period so startling that it might justly be accepted with hesitation, were not the conception unavoidable before a series of facts as extraordinary as itself Collapse We have already noted that crustal subsidences, sometimes amounting to veritable collapses, occurred in some regions simultaneously with the late Pleistocene elevation of mountains elsewhere. They were evidently part and parcel of the same terrible world calamity, and a few words about them will be appropriate here. Both the Canaries and the Azores experienced widespread volcanic activity during late Pleistocene times, the sea floor round the Azores in particular being covered by lava. Unlike the Canary and Madeira islands, the Azores are situated on the eastern slope of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Since the great ocean basins either side of it are only thinly coated with sediments and in places are actually barren of them', it is generally regarded as very youthful'. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge is also directly associated with a great world-encircling fracture complex which we will discuss shortly. Tachylite, a lava which naturally disintegrates in sea water within 15,000 years of eruption, lies on the sea-bed around the Azores and apparently dates from outpourings less than 13,000 years ago. How much younger than that date is unknown. Notwithstanding this, may we not wonder if all these islands were once a part of an Atlantic plateau extending westwards of the Anti-Atlas mountains previously noted as having formerly extended to the Canary Islands -- which submerged as recently as the late Pleistocene? That such possibilities should be seriously considered finds support in the discovery of geologically very young beach sand in two deep-sea cores procured in this area from depths of 10,500ft (3,250m) and 18,440ft (5,700m), indicating that the region was above sea level at no very remote period. The noted oceanographer Maurice Ewing concluded from this evidence that: Either the land must have sunk two or three miles, or the sea must once have been two or three miles lower than now. Either conclusion is startling If the sea was once two miles lower, where would all the extra water have gone. Only the greatest conceivable disturbance could have produced crustal faults and collapses as great as these. By the well-developed method of echo-sounding, an expedition in which Dr Ewing took a prominent part measured the thickness of the sedimentary ooze on the slopes of the foothills of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Rugged Andes Mountains

Rugged Mountains of The World These showed:.thousands of feet of sediment on the foothills of the Ridge. Surprisingly, however, in the great flat plains on either side of the Ridge, this sediment appears to lie less than l00 ft thick... Always it has been thought that the sediment must be extremely thick, since it had been accumulating for countless ages... But on the level basins that flank the Mid-Atlantic Ridge our signals came back too close together to measure the time between them... They show the sediment in the basins is less than l00ft thick. Granitic and sedimentary rocks which must originally have been &quot;part of a continent&quot; were dredged up near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge from a depth of 3,600ft (1lOOm). They exhibited deep scratches and striations similar to those stones in `drift' formations commonly attributed to glacial action. However, in the same area there were found &quot;.. .some loosely consolidated mud stones, so soft and weak that they would not have held together in the iron grasp of a glacier. How they got there is another riddle to be solved by further research&quot;. As discovered earlier, it seems highly questionable that there ever was a glacial age of the type clearly envisaged by Ewing and other geologists. Together with many other geological and topographic formations on the bed of the Atlantic these mud stones were formed not underwater but in the open air, and must, despite their present fragile state, date from a time when that portion of the ocean floor was above sea level. A precisely similar conclusion has been reached by another writer respecting the Mid-Atlantic Ridge itself. He wrote: .the inequalities, the mountains and valleys of its surface, could never have been produced in

accordance with any laws for the deposition of sediment, nor by submarine elevation; but, on the contrary, must have been carved by agencies acting above the water level. Although writing in the 1920s, the celebrated French geologist Pierre Termier spoke of a nowvanished North Atlantic landmass in terms as valid now as then. He stated: The conclusion is inevitable: the land which existed about 900km to the north of the Azores and, perhaps, embracing these isles, was plunged into the deep, in times so comparatively recent that geologists call it `the present', and actually it is as if it all happened for us but yesterday. It may not be unreasonable, especially in view of confirmatory biological evidence to be detailed later, to regard the volcanic upheavals traced on the bed of the Atlantic around the Azores as having occurred synchronously with the breakup and subsidence of Appalachia, the name given by geologists to a continental landmass in the North Atlantic also known as North Atlantis. Now reposing some two miles (3.2km) below the level of the adjacent continental shelves Appalachia connected Europe and North America via Greenland and Iceland. The fact that the degree of its submergence accords closely with that of the ocean basin flanking the Mid-Atlantic Ridge as determined by Ewing, is particularly noteworthy. Although it is now impossible to estimate the true extent of Appalachia, it must, as Brewster observed, have been: ...a large continent, for the sand and gravel and mud which the rivers washed out to sea and the waves ground up on the shore have built up most of half a dozen big states [in North America], while in some places the deposits are a mile thick.184 Like many others, Prof Scharff of Dublin argued that this landmass foundered during late Tertiary times, excepting the Azores and the Madeiras which were: ...still connected in early Pleistocene (Ice Age) times with the continents of Europe and Africa, at a time when man had already made his appearance in western Europe, and was able to reach the islands by land' In Geikie's opinion, however, certain biological evidence-- shows that continuous land united Greenland and north-west Europe as late as post-glacial times, a view shared by Prof Judd and Forrest was among those who concluded that this landmass &quot;.. .sank beneath the sea at the end of the Ice Age&quot;. It is also relevant that a truly colossal amount of sea-bed scour, or erosion, has been traced between Greenland and North America and ascribed to a time loosely termed as `glacial' Presumably these crustal disturbances -- collapses, for they were nothing less -- occurred more or less simultaneously with the subsidence of the entire North Atlantic floor between Greenland and Norway by some 9,000ft (275Dm), a convulsion which Forrest believed took place &quot;since the Ice Age&quot;.

In our submission these tremendous changes occurred synchronously with the break-up and drowning of the greater part of Fennoscandia, a now-submerged northern landmass formerly connecting Spitzbergen with northern Eurasia (map 1B). Leaving the Atlantic for the Indian Ocean we find in the latter interesting evidence for the geologically recent submergence of another extensive landmass or series of large islands which Wallace called the great Southern Continent~°. This submergence was apparently yet another facet of the global catastrophe under discussion and, as in so many other areas, here also it was accompanied by stupendous volcanic activity. Records of this were gathered by the Swedish survey ship Albatross in 1947, when, for several hundred miles south-east of Sri Lanka, it sailed over a vast and continuous plateau of hardened lava. This filled almost all the earlier valleys on the sea-bed and gave the ocean floor there a singularly level surface. One recent authority regarded this lava as being very probably the undersea counterpart of the Deccan trap of India, where basaltic lava several thousand feet thick continuously covers an area of not less than 250,000 square miles (647,500 km2). According to H F Blanford, the eruption of this material may have been synchronous with the sinking of Wallace's Southern Continent, of which he believed the Seychelles, Mauritius, the Adas Bank, the Laccadives, Maldives and Chagos island groups, and the Saya de Malha (Mulha) are the last surviving remnants. To Blanford's list can also be added Sri Lanka, for it is believed to have been severed from the Indian state of Madras &quot;in sub-recent times&quot;. In passing, we should note that considerable botanical and zoological evidence exists supporting the geologically-recent reality of extensive land in the southern Indian Ocean, and over much of present-day Oceania. Concerning the latter, Prof Scharff has written: ...Dr von Ihering goes so far as to positively state that in his opinion the Polynesian Islands are not volcanic eruptions of the sea floor, which being without life were successively peopled from Australia and the neighbouring islands, but the remains of a great Pacific continent, which was in early times connected with other continental masses. That the subsidence of this pan-Pacific landmass occurred within the memoty of humanity appears to be borne out by ancient Maori recollections of Hawaiki, their ancestral `fatherland' which, though properly outside the immediate concern of geophysics, certainly represents curious but peculiarly telling auxiliary records of this disaster. S P Smith summarised these memories as follows: In some of these epithets of the ancient fatherland, it is clear to me that a continent rather than

an island is referred to, and this is the description given to me of Hawaikinui, by Tare Watere Te Kahu, a very learned member of the Ngai-Tahu tribe... `Hawaikinui was a mainland (Tua Wht'nua) with vast plains on the side towards the sea and a high range of snowy mountains on the inland side; through this country ran the river Tohinga. Numerous geological and palaeontological facts also apparently point to the former and rather recent existence of this old Pacific continent, while the severity of the cataclysm which overwhelmed it may be gauged by the staggeringly large crustal dislocations of `late Pleistocene' date in central Westland, New Zealand. There, the vertical crustal uplift east of the great fault in the Southern Alps (South Island) is estimated to have been as much as 58,500ft (18,000m) with a horizontal displacement of similar magnitude. Positively stupefying, this crustal change represents a catastrophic action so huge that, even by itself, it would have caused worldwide repercussions. That it was merely a part of still greater crustal disturbances having ramifications far beyond New Zealand underscores the giant scale of these events in Oceania during times usually stated as terminal Pleistocene. These changes extended even to the northernmost Pacific, where a continental-sized landmass, occupying the whole of the Bering Straits and the oceanfloor immediately south of it, foundered at the end of Pleistocene times. The scale of the subsidence more or less simultaneously with the subsidence of its western sector, particularly along the eastern coastline of the Kamchatka peninsula, was spectacular. Science knows this sunken land as Beringia (see map 1B). We may not err far in assuming that such tremendous crustal disorders occurred more or less simultaneously with the subsidence of Appalachia, Fennoscandia and the great sunken continent in the south Indian Ocean, and with the uprise of the many major mountain ranges previously mentioned. We shall now see that this was almost certainly so.

Shatter

The formation of certain salient topographical features, such as fiords, are usually attributed in the majority of textbooks to the action of moving ice. Detailed field studies of the welldeveloped fiord systems of Greenland, the Hebrides and Scandinavia have tended to favour quite another explanation, namely that they had a tectonic origin, are really gigantic cracks in the Earth's crust, occupied and partially modified by glaciers only at a later date. It has been discovered that glaciers do not hollow fiords, but, through the transportation of stony debris from higher to lower levels, tend instead to choke fiord mouths and diminish or even nullify thereby the alleged excavating power of glacier ice. Numerous students of fiords are agreed on this matter. Certainly ice cannot have easily produced those fiords which are open at both ends, or extend across sea-floors! Acceptance of a tectonic origin for fiords also eliminates the necessity of attributing immensely long periods of time for their formation, such as would be required had ice excavated them. This is an important point.

Fiords also appear to be inseparably linked to a more fundamental crustal fracture complex encircling the globe, to which submarine canyons, deep-sea trenches and the celebrated Great Rift Valley of Africa all belong (see map 1C). All seem to be connected with a huge crack which traverses the Earth's crust for over 40,000 miles (64,000km) on a long meandering course. Nearly all the fractures associated with this giant crack show geologically youthful images. Many deep-sea trenches, for example, conlain little in the way of in-filling sediments, and the walls of many fractures are sharp and angular. General agreement exists that this fracturing occurred on a planetary scale and everywhere at about the same tirne2Th Some authorities have also argued that, for the observable effects to have been produced, the Earth's axis must formerly have been inclined in a more vertical plane than at present. This also is an important point relative to the classical references to axial orientation in the legendary Golden Age and Proctor's

observation on the polar inclination obtaining when the aquatic constellations were invented

Dictionaries define excoriation as the stripping or removal of skin by abrasion. Here, we apply this process to the surface of the Earth's skin, its crust or lithosphere, in that it has caused the sudden fissuring and violent break-up of many surface rocks predating those classified as Pleistocene. This fissuring occurred alike on land and under the sea, its extent being worldwide and clearly linked to acute crustal dislocation. Numerous submarine valleys are actually great crustal fractures now partially filled by sediments, and are intimately associated with the collapse of areas now forming ocean basins and the faulting and submergence of the continental shelves. It is particularly interesting to note some renowned authorities suggesting that such profound changes might have been due to external influence exerted by some stellar body a cosmic visitor. Other fractures and rock fissures are demonstrably connected with the massive late Pleistocene orogeny previously reviewed. The Gangetic Trough, for instance, evidently originated with the elevation of the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau to their present height. The fact that the Gangetic Trough is 1,200 miles (1,900km) long, averages 250 miles (400km) in width, and is over 6,500ft (2,000m) deep, indicates the colossal power of the forces producing both it and the associated orogeny. It is a Pleistocene feature, yet, although the mighty River Ganges now flows along it, the trough itself is largely choked by Pleistocene debris of enormous thickness2~'. Gravity surveys have indicated that these in-filling deposits are about 6,SOOft (2,000m) thick27, and &quot;.. .cannot be earlier than sub-Recent&quot; in age.

Many further similar examples could be given from around the world. Suffice it here to observe that the foregoing evidence clearly shows that the end of the Pleistocene epoch was charactensed by gigantic and violent crustal convulsions which, viewed globally, were nothing short of cataclysmic. They did not punctuate a comparatively inert world in which the sub-polar latitudes lay under tremendously thick slow-moving ice-sheets. The sheer volume and extent of the strata affected by these disorders and the great heights and depths to which strata were redistributed indicates that, if the ice-sheets of orthodoxy really existed, then the ice must have covered regions which were either in the process of being enormously upheaved, displaced, vertically faulted and fissured, or subsided to remarkable depths. None of these unstable crustal conditions could have been conducive to the formation or maintenance of ice-sheets like those conventionally envisaged.

Special note should be taken of the repeated datings of these crustal derangements by acknowledged authorities: `late Pleistocene', `terminal Pleistocene', `end of the Ice Age', `post-- glacial', and so on. Although Agassiz and other early advocates of the Ice Age argued that the ice developed before the rise of the Alps and other high ranges, modern glacialists all agree that high mountainous land is necessary to provide (and replenish) the snow from which glacier ice is derived, to supposedly produce the various geological phenomena allegedly characteristic of glacial conditions. If, however, most of the world's present major ranges attained their existing elevations a mere few thowsands years or so ago, where was the high land attracting heavy snowfalls and providing the ice and the motive power for the alleged ice-sheets specifically stated to have preceded the modern uplands? Did ice in another guise cause the supposed glacial phenomena, distribute the `drift' and disperse the `erratics'? Rather than ice-sheets, abnormal numbers of `drift'-laden icebergs were at one time conjectured as having floated equatorwards from polar regions, depositing `erra tics' and `drift' and polishing and striating rock surfaces as they did so. That hypothesis was eventually discarded, as no reasonable mechanism could be determined which would generate excessive numbers of icebergs for a limited (glacial) period, cease doing so for a following (interglacial) period, and then reactivate the cycle again -- not once but several times. Modern icebergs, moreover, carry little stony debris and very few rocks that are describable as `erratics'. It is certainly unscientific to suppose without good evidence that icebergs behaved differently in the past or were burdened with stony cargoes vastly different from those they carry today.

A closer look at conventional Ice Age concepts, at the capacity of large masses of ice and at the geological phenomena commonly attributed to large scale ice action, suggests that the Ice Age, if it ever really existed, must have done so after the majority of the above-mentioned crustal disturbancc had taken place. Certainly the shattering the Earth's crust had already occurred by that time. As the following selection of information amply demonstrates, northern latitudes have yielded several unexpected discoveries totally at variance with the tenet of vast sprawling North Polar ice-sheets. Their collective message is a singular one. Firstly, numerous marine shells, often of currently-existing species, lie at high elevations on several islands in Arctic Canada. They should have been pulverised had ice-sheets ever crept across those territories, for in no instance do they appear to have been deposited where they are now found since alleged Ice Age times. Secondly, among the most telling details in this category are the numerous enclaves of unglaciated territory within regions which, glacialists long argued, supposedly lay under thick, continuous ice-sheets, not once but on several successive occasions. In addition to the molluscan testimony just noted, we should carefully mark that no evidence is known from southern Scotland of glaciation antedating the so-called latest observable ice advance, which glacialists call the Weichselian advance. Indeed, it has lately been urged that not only was southern Scottish topography much the same before the Ice Age as it is now but also that south-western Scotland suffered less glacial erosion than surrounding regions because of its generally lower altitude -- despite glacialists depicting that area as a major centre of glaciation on Ice Age maps of Britain (see map 1D). Farther north, deeply weathered, undisturbed, soils in Aberdeenshire were seemingly never glaciated, while further north still, on the North Sea bed near the Shetland islands, supposed glacial deposits dated as Weichselian are unexpectedly thin or absent altogether. Again, in the Frigg Field area (59°N, 2°F) midway between the Shetlands and Norway, sea-floor cores are devoid of identifiable glacial deposits. This discovery has suggesied that:

...some part of the northern North Sea wasice-free in the late Weichselian glacial advance, but this is difficult to reconcile with the suggestion that Shetland was glaciated in the Weichselian by ice which came from the east -- probably from Scandinavia.

Similar problems surround the presence of demonstrably British `erratic' boulders of porphyry, limestone and sandstone on and just south of the Dogger Bank area of the North Sea, because the Weichselian ice sheet alleged to have transported them there is commonly envisaged as having advanced from the direction of Norway to the northeast. These `erratics' can only have travelled from the north-west against the supposed direction of the Weichselian ice-flow.Significantly, comparable evidence occurs in the Outer Hebrides on the other side of the British Isles. There, rock striae indicate that whatever scored them proceeded from the north-west. Hebridean glaciation is usually held to have advanced from the north-east, the very opposite direction.

Data from the Faeroe islands, even farther north, cast further doubts on the very existence of former extensive ice-sheets in the North Sea region. Deposits attributed to ice action have been interpreted there as due to local ice, &quot;...rather than to an ice-sheet advancing from the north or having contact with the Norwegian nier de glace&quot;. On mainland Britain, several `drift'-less areas in northern Fngland -- south of York, for example -- reinforce the general picture now emerging, as does the apparent failure of any ice to have crossed the North Sea to terrain north of the Humber. During so-called Weichselian times the Norwegian mountains were supposedly the centre of a regular nier de glace which, at its maximum, stretched south-westwards to embrace not only the Faeroes, Shetlands and Orkneys, mainland Scotland and Wales, all but southernmost England and the entire North Sea area, but also the whole of Fire. As previously noted, many parts of this extensive region were apparently never glaciated at all -- a detail paralleled by the absence of detectable glaciations on the Lofoten islands. (68~N, 15°E) and the unglaciated character of innumerable jagged rocks off Norway's western coast. Moreover, the lower deposits occupying the adjacent Norwegian deep-sea trench are also apparently non-glacial2. Why is glacial evidence absent from parts of mainland Britain and the bed of the North Sea if an ice-sheet allegedly mantled that entire region? Was it because, as intimated earlier, glacial action actually never occurred there? Notable reinterpretations of alleged glacial deposits in England and Ireland have also recently been proposed. At lpswich in Suffolk, well known glacial sequences formerly considered as representative of three glacial phases are now regarded as typifying only one. Again, despite a supposedly well-established stratigraphy (identification of the relative position of layers of deposits), there is now little evidence that in Northern Ireland `drift' deposits are much older than 10,000 years BP, a date commonly stated to be that when the Ice Age finally ended. Comparable evidence is also known from mainland Europe, the North Atlantic, the Arctic Ocean and North America -- but as we have already noted several examples from some of these regions we need mention here only a small selection of additional instances. In Europe, the Alpine record of glaciation -- the earliest studies of which, remember, initiated the concept of an Ice Age -- shows it to be not only very youthfld, but also surprisingly sparse. Indeed, except for deposits of Weichselian date, the overall record there is &quot;very spotty&quot;237. It is a very well known fact that much of the world's rainfall occurs when windblown, moistureladen air rises over upland areas, and that when this concerns mountains or high hills the moisture often descends not as rain but as snow. Especially relevant to this is the conclusion reached by the celebrated glacialist Albrecht Penck, that Alpine snowfall during Ice Age times was not appreciably heavier than that of today. If that were indeed so, it would be illogical to postulate that immense ice-sheets developed then in and around the Alps if they do not do so now. But other important factors are involved and should be considered here. The Alps attained their present height suddenly and violently in times so recent that their upthrust actually post-dated the era normally assigned to the Ice Age itself.Thus the Alps, as we

know them, hardly existed when the Ice Age is supposed to have occurred. They were merely a &quot;chain of low hills&quot;. This means that, if the Alps were formerly much lower, they were unlikely to have attracted the heavier snowfalls required to underpin the formation of the huge ice-- sheets of conventional Ice Age dogma. If the Alps, Rockies, Himalayas and other major mountain ranges rose to their present elevations only at the close of the Pleistocene epoch -- during or just after the final stages of the supposed Ice Age, we can scarcely continue to associate the development of massive ice-sheets with mountain systems generally too low to have acted as effective causal agents of such glaciations. Significantly, no ice-sheets of any magnitude are presently developing in or around the world's greatest mountain ranges, themselves all now much higher than in Pleistocene times. As we shall see later, the great ice-sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have formed as a result of the operation of other factors. Thus, if many of today's highest mountains were much lower when the alleged Ice Age was reputedly at its zenith, how did so much ice, if it actually existed, manage to accumulate? Indeed, we can take a step further and ask whether the ice-sheets so beloved of glacialists ever existed at all! In addition to the above-mentioned objections, many more exist which echo the same query. A look at some of these is educational. Claims that glacial deposits exist on the floor of the Barents Sea, north of Norway, have lately been dismissed as incorrect. No glacial mantle ever existed there, and none ever connected Scandinavia, Novaya Zemlya, Franz Josef Land or Spitzbergen. The aforementioned detail that Spitzbergen was apparently never glaciated is thus found to be entirely compatible with the absence of glacial deposits on the surrounding sea-floor. Yet innumerable maps of the Ice Age have long persisted in depicting the region embracing all these lands, as also that of the Alps, as buried under enormous ice-sheets (see map liE). Earlier, we drew attention to the remarkable speed with which the final stage of the Ice Age -- the Younger Dryas episode of late Weichselian times -- came to an end, and how its closing stages were linked to abrupt increases in snowfall and radical oceanic, climatic and botanical changes across much of the northern hemisphere. Initially it might be considered reasonable to expect the end of an Ice Age to herald warmer conditions, but widespread investigations have shown that the reverse actually happened:

temperatures generally fell as the effects attending the termination of the Younger Dryas episode (or Alleröd as it is sometimes referred to) were experienced globally~°. Sea-surface temperatures, for example, dropped in the North Atlantic241, in the western North Pacific, in the South China Sea and even in the tropical Sulu Sea between the Philippines and northern Borneo (Kalimantan), where marine cores indicate a &quot;pronounced cooling of surface waters during Younger Dryas times&quot; in tandem with an increased summer monsoonal regime in central China. Late Pleistocene sediments in deep-sea cores obtained from the bed of the central North

Traditional Ice Age Map Atlantic contain the remains of plank-tonic foraminifera -- minute marine organisms -- which collectively exhibit faunal patterns so complex that they cannot have resulted from temperature oscillations like those commonly associated with glacial cycles. Similar puzzles have been afforded by marine cores from the Caribbean basin. These show a former mixing of top and bottom ocean-water layers ten times faster than the speed at which the succession of glacial and interglacial episodes is supposed to have taken place. It was, therefore, concluded that :.because of the unique character of deep-sea sedimentation, a change in the average would require major alterations to the physiography of the earth and/or in the biological balance of the high seas. As shown by other aforementioned data, that is precisely what the general record of Younger Dryas times repeatedly urges. Effects of changes like these were widespread. They were, for example, felt around Hudson Bay, across Atlantic Canada and in the northeastern USA, and occurred even as far south as South America and Antarctica

The demonstrably global extent of these environmental changes, which inevitably affected plants and land animals in many latitudes, is paralleled by a similar worldwide concordance of their general dates of occurrence.

In southern Chile, for example, when these changes impoverished older beetle populations, their effects took place about 10,000 years BP, approximately at the time when North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures dropped. Tibet became suddenly wetter, and the vegetation in northwestern USA underwent marked changes. Very clearly something important occurred during or just before the 10,000 years BP datum indicated, something large enough to affect practically the whole of Earth's environmental conditions and huge numbers of the planet' natural inhabitants. Particularly interesting and certainly perplexing is the well-established fact that many allegedly glaciated hills and mountains in the northern hemisphere are scored and striated from top to bottom on their northern sides only. In North America this remarkable condition is quite common258. It would thus seem that ice-sheets glaciated the northern and north-western faces of these eminences as they slowly crawled up them but failed to glaciate the southern slopes as they

presumably accelerated down them -- an effect completely opposite to that allegedly generated by downward-moving masses of ice -- for example, that of glaciers. In any case, as shown below, ice cannot ascend hills. Of further relevance is the fact that deposits of gravel and other `drift' inaterials sometimes occur only on the northern and north-western flanks of hills, in sonic instances showing every indication of having been actually plastered up against the hillsides with great force259. Many cases of this occur on both sides of the Atlantic. In Labrador, for example, `erratic' boulders have been rammed into hillsides apparently with much violence26. Rather interestingly, eastern Labrador, together with Newfoundland, was apparently never glaciated2~. A strange selectivity arises here. Also noteworthy is the occurrence of so-called `drift' materials at localities far beyond the limits of the most extensively conceived ice-sheets. Thus, if ice action genuinely distributed all the `drift' deposits within the supposed limits of the greatest ice-sheets then it somehow also contrived to do so in many areas ice is supposed never to have reached. Large `erratic' boulders in the Sahara Desert; on the Mongolian plains, and in subtropical Uruguay constitute a parallel anomaly. And when it is discovered that it is possible to produce rock striae like those usually attributed to ice action (see figs I .6-I by such dissimilar agents as driIt-sand2~, fast--moving nic~es nrdentes (swiftly flowing, high temperature, gaseous clouds erupted from volcanoes, see fig 1.8), snow, mud-- slides2~ and high pressure grit-charged steam~, we are obliged to seriously question

Inescapable Evidence To those accustomed to the now well-established notion of a Pleistocene Ice Age like that advocated by Agassiz and championed so forcefully by Geikie and others in the last century or who are aware of the modifications made to it this century, the substance and abundance of the foregoing interrelated details may well astonish. After all, has not the idea of an Ice Age been carefully investigated from every angle by armies of experts in multitudes of concerned disciplines for over 150 years? Although the actual cause of the Ice Age is still uncertain the reality of such an age is surely beyond dispute? Surely so many specialists cannot all have consistently misread the record for so long? The underlying problem, of course, has been the continued acceptance of the constraints inherent in Lyell's `uniformitarianism', with its insistence upon terrestrial agencies being the sole generators of observable topographical and atmospheric changes, irrespective of the individual scale, speed or intensity of these. A major outcome of this entrenched perspective has been the steady accumulation of unaccommodatable data diametrically opposed to, or at least highly bruising of, Lyellian concepts and the notion of an Ice Age. Dispassionate consideration of this `anomalous' data leads unerringly to the realization that: `uniformitarianism', while certainly not a fallacious doctrine, is yet no more than a particular aspect of a wider whole -- which we discussed earlier in Part One: 7 Perspectives -- a question of scale; also, that something other than ice, operating in a worldwide capacity~ was responsible for the deposition of `drift' and the creation of other supposedly Ice Age phenomena. Particularly interesting and certainly perplexing is the well-established fact that many allegedly glaciated hills and mountains in the northern hemisphere are scored and striated from top to bottom on their northern sides only. In North America this remarkable condition is quite common. It would thus seem that ice-sheets glaciated the northern and north-western faces of these eminences as they slowly crawled up them but failed to glaciate the southern slopes as they presumably accelerated down them -- an effect completely opposite to that allegedly generated by downward-moving masses of ice -- for example, that of glaciers. In any case, as shown below, ice cannot ascend hills. Of further relevance is the fact that deposits of gravel and other `drift' materials sometimes

occur only on the northern and north-western flanks of hills, in sonic instances showing every indication of having been actually plastered up against the hillsides with great force. Many cases of this occur on both sides of the Atlantic. In Labrador, for example, `erratic' boulders have been rammed into hillsides apparently with much violence. Rather interestingly, eastern Labrador, together with Newfoundland, was apparently never glaciated A strange selectivity arises here. Also noteworthy is the occurrence of so-called `drift' materials at localities far beyond the limits of the most extensively conceived ice-sheets. Thus, if ice action genuinely distributed all the `drift' deposits within the supposed limits of the greatest ice-sheets then it somehow also contrived to do so in many areas ice is supposed never to have reached.

Large `erratic' boulders in the Sahara Desert; on the Mongolian plains, and in subtropical Uruguay constitute a parallel anomaly. And when it is discovered that it is possible to produce rock striae like those usually attributed to ice action by such dissimilar agents as drift-sand, (swiftly flowing, high temperature, gaseous clouds erupted from volcanoes, snow, mud-- slide and high pressure grit-charged steam, we are obliged to seriously question the alleged glacial origin of striae generally, particularly when, as in numerous instances, they, too, occur far outside the furthest traceable limits of supposed bygone ice-sheets. Still other `peculiarities' are exhibited by geological phenomena associated with Ice Age doctrine. Scrutinized more closely these also reveal yet more doubts about the former reality of an Ice Age like that favoured by orthodoxy. Eroded and fragmentary shells occur within the `drift' deposits on Moel Tryfaen, a mountain in North Wales rising 1,300ft (400m) above sea level. Perplexingly the species represented include not only northern but also temperate and southern forms adapted to very varied habitats. Some required deep and others shallow water, some sandy and others muddy water; and some were peculiar to shingly and others to a bare rocky environment265. In contrast to the above we now perceive an unnatural generality in the evidence. In stating that ice could never have brought together so varied a molluscan assemblage as this, it is hardly necessary to add that water could have -- in which case the enveloping `drift' deposits must have been similarly water-borne. Such a conclusion was reached by the great English geologist Roderick Murchison with regard to the `drift' deposits of Russia and by many of the earlier American geologists respecting the same beds in the USA. One of these geologists, Prof Andrews, as cited by Howorth, remarked that many: gravel hills are sharp and conical and interspersed with deep circular valleys without outlets, from which the region has obtained the popular name of the Potash Kettles... It would seem to be an unavoidable inference that our drift of this region not only came from the north, but it came in a vast sweep of water deep enough to cover gravel hills 800ft high, and with velocity enough to throw coarse material into lofty and steep summits.

Again, it may be asked how is it possible to ascribe to ice in any form the simultaneous dumping of huge `erratics' at all kinds ot elevations alongside thick accumulations of `drift' containing delicate shells when, at other localities, and at equally varied heights, other `erratics', occurring far from shells and `drift' of any kind, repose directly upon bare, polished and striated rock surfaces attributed to the same icy process supposedly responsible elsewhere for depositing the `drift' and the organic remains (shells included) it often encloses? If ice was responsible for the above phenomena, the remorseless grinding and scouring of everything in its line of advance should have been as capable of removing all small stones and grit, not to mention fragile shells, as it was of wrenching off from parent bedrock the huge stones deposited as `erratics' with, it sometimes seems, great violence. But it didn't. Nor, we may point out, did ice-sheets allegedly capable of producing results like those just enumerated ever invade

the regions inhabited by the southern shell species. Nevertheless, the same species occur in `drift' deposits at many places located in temperate zones supposedly laid down by ice-sheets said to have proceeded from the north. Here we have another example of `inferred' ice action and direction of operation at variance with field evidence. Puzzling though the evidence is, ice assuredly never simultaneously transported to the same locality so many climatically-undifferentiated shell species -- and Moel Tryfaen is but one of several very similar instances elsewhere. It follows therefore that ice did not accumulate the enveloping `drift' deposits either, or those like it elsewhere. Nor, as further corollary, can it have dispersed the `erratic' boulders or striated rock surfaces intimately associated with the `drift' beds. And, it may also be asked, why do the `erratics' and the `drift' sometimes abound on the higher peaks only to be absent from adjacent lower ground? Such effects are scarcely those of normal `uniformitarian' actions.

Indeed, the longer such problems are pondered the less likely it seems that ice could, under any conceivable circumstances, have caused such effects, and indications mount up that the supposed Ice Age of Pleistocene times was really no more' than an icy chmera. If so, then the validity of the Pleistocene period itself, as a distinct geological division, is also called into question. But before the Ice Age is pre-emptorally jettisoned here as the causal agent behind all the above-mentioned phenomena, let us be certain that all normal actions of ice have been duly considered and abandoned as untenable for sound reasons. Nothing less satisfies. As presently understood, the physics of ice suggests that, on attaining a sufficient thickness, the supposed ice-sheets of the Ice Age must have moved under the influence of gravity, and that, due to the enormous weight of the ice, the movement would have been downwards -- from higher to lower levels. Due to the composition of ice, this movement or fl moved on downhill gradients, and that only its upper layers would have moved over flat country. Sir Henry Howorth emphasized this when he wrote: A more important and far-reaching difficulty... is the proved incapacity of glacier ice, as of any other viscous body, to travel over enormous stretches of level country, and up and down long hills, as it must have done if the glacial theory is to become the final and effective explanation of a large part of the drift phenomena.

Glacialists, however, have usually argued that glaciers do not behave in the same way as icesheets (such as those on Greenland and in Antarctica)

If ice was responsible for the above phenomena, the remorseless grinding and scouring of everything in its line of advance should have been as capable of removing all small stones and grit, not to mention fragile shells, as it was of wrenching off from parent bedrock the huge stones deposited as `erratics' with, it sometimes seems, great violence. But it didn't. Nor, we may point out, did ice-sheets allegedly capable of producing results like those just enumerated ever invade the regions inhabited by the southern shell species. Nevertheless, the same species occur in `drift' deposits at many places located in temperate zones supposedly laid down by ice-sheets said to have proceeded from the north. Here we have another example of `inferred' ice action and direction of operation at variance with field evidence.

Puzzling though the evidence is, ice assuredly never simultaneously transported to the same locality so many climatically-undifferentiated shell species -- and Moel Tryfaen is but one of several very similar instances elsewhere. It follows therefore that ice did not accumulate the enveloping `drift' deposits either, or those like it elsewhere. Nor, as further corollary, can it have dispersed the `erratic' boulders or striated rock surfaces intimately associated with the `drift' beds. And, it may also be asked, why do the `erratics' and the `drift' (as in Eire for example) sometimes abound on the higher peaks only to be absent from adjacent lower ground? Such effects are scarcely those of normal `uniformitarianism' actions. The' excavating and demolition powers of thick moving ice, relative to the glacialist's assumption that ice-sheets broke up the surface strata they supposedly over-rode, were also discussed by Howorth, who observed: Ice is much softer and more easily crushed than the great majority of rocks, and would itself be crushed and reduced to slush by its own pressure long before the rock upon which it stands could itself be broken... We must always remember the kinds of materials upon which the supposed crushing was effected. These are not lumps of soft rock showing crushed outlines, but clean broken and shattered masses with their surfaces still raw and unhealed, consisting of the hardest crystalline rocks such as granites, seynites, porphyries, etc, as well as limestones, sandstones and chalk, and we are asked to believe that the same ice-sheets which thus shattered such intractable materials in situ after passing on a few yards travelled over beds of laminated and stratified sand and loam with such a gentle touch as not to disturb the laminations.. Very interestingly, ice is protective as well as destructive. The incalculable power of thick ice moving continuously down a gradient is, of course, well known, and such ice may well have planed off rock surfaces, scored and striated others, and removed previous loose boulders and unconsolidated surface deposits obstructing its downward course. But to achieve this the ice must be moving. On reaching level terrain the ice-flow would speedily cease. It has long been established that glaciers on descending-to-level ground quickly lose their forward momentum. Stationary, ice fails to significantly injure even fragile shells or loose accumulations of soft sand or grits. It simply stagnates and, very often, slowly melts away. Thus ice on level terrain, being, as we have just noted, unable to move in any direction of its own volition, would tend to actually protect rather than abrade any land surface it mantled. Indeed, the great ice-sheet presently covering the land surface of Antarctica appears to play an almost totally protective role. The ice there also exhibits a notable absence of stony debris in the glaciers and icebergs so typical of that southern continent, despite the fact that its sub-ice topography is in places known to be ruggedly mountainous. Consequently there is a singular scarcity of surface moraines in Antarctica -- a certain pointer to the near-minimal surface scour presently occurring there. Yet, during so-called Ice Age times, great ice-sheets like that of Antarctica are stated to have caused spectacular land surface damage on virtually a hemispheric scale! It is undoubtedly noteworthy that neither mountain glaciers generally, nor the Antarctic or Greenland ice-sheets, are now accumulating extensive `drift'-like deposits. Moreover, present

glacier moraines contain angular rocks tin like the usually rounded stones and boulders in the `drift' itself. These latter are themselves usually rounder than that other vexatious Ice Age phenomenon, the `erratics'. It can be truly held, therefore, that modern glacial (glacier) deposits possess virtually no typical `drift'-like features and should be more accurately described as `heterogeneous (unstratified) muck'. Again, although moraines are today found at the foot of many glaciers, it does not necessarily signify that every moraine associated with `drift' deposits was actually produced by glacial action. A receding sea-tide will leave what is essentially a moraine upon a beach, and at least one good record is known of a morainic structure formed by unusually severe cloudbursts -- moraines which covered several acres and contained trees, soil, stones and boulders weighing up to an estimated 100 tonnes each275.

As repeatedly recorded, `drift' is often encountered in the most unexpected places. The collective effect of such distribution is the very opposite of that which could be anticipated from thick ice-sheets allegedly disintegrating the rock surfaces they are said to have over-ridden. Such theoretical ice movements could be expected to sweep bare all hillsides and summits, accumulating the resultant debris (`drift') in valleys and on lower ground. That the `drift' was often not deposited and distributed in that fashion only serves to support the aforementioned fact that ice (even as huge sheets) does not and cannot naturally ascend gradients (let alone the steep inclines and summits of lofty hills and mountains). Nor, as Howorth and others have stressed, should we expect ice --under whatever guise -- to have behaved differently in the past.

If, therefore, past and present ice movements were essentially identical, the ice-sheets of glacial theory could have flowed down gradients only, or for strictly limited distances across generally flat countryside. From this it follows that the succession of glacial advances and retreats envisaged by glacialists as typifying Pleistocene times, and supposed to have ebbed and flowed across hundreds, even thousands of miles of diverse terrain, were more or less physical impossibilities, In short, they cannot have actually existed. Thus the distinctive names awarded this alternating cycle of glacial advances and retreats also become largely meaningless. Numerous lines of enquiry converge upon the startling fact that the Ice Age of orthodoxy is no more than the shaky theory it always has been and its alleged former reality, as conceived by its advocates, just a wonderful myth. There was indeed an `ice age', but, it occurred at a later date and was of comparatively brief duration.

If, as demonstrated, the great ice-sheets so beloved of glacialists never existed, because the uplands so necessary for their development and maintenance were either too low or non-existent during alleged Ice Age times, and because ice, even very thick ice, cannot behave in the manner required by glacial theory, it follows that other geological phenomena commonly ascribed to massive ice-action were caused by some other agency or combination of circumstances. Among such phenomena may be mentioned moraines, striated rocks, rock flutings, giant surface grooves, cirques (bowl-shaped hollows at the top of valleys), hanging valleys (tributary valleys hanging high above valleys they feed into), rockies moutonnées (polished rock surfaces), kettle-holes (small bowl-like depressions), drumlins (oval hillocks), eskers (long gravel ridges), kames (sand-gravel ridges), `erratic' boulders and various other types of surface denudation.

Turmoil Unleased

The idea of huge circumpolar ice-sheets relentlessly creeping for thousands of years across extensive swathes of land rendered desolate and frigid, and in which nothing very sudden occurred (save, perhaps, the collapse of large pieces of ice), has long been an essentially uniformitarian concept. The occurrence of so much ice has often been regarded more as a biological than as a geophysical catastrophe, but one which, operating so slowly in most regions, has come to be thought of as gradual. Neither the biological nor the geological record, however,

support this view, for both reflect catastrophe and destruction on a global scale. It is widely agreed that, towards the close of Pleistocene times, profound climatic deterioration occurred worldwide. Numerous life-forms previously dominant or very prolific either became extinct or greatly depleted numerically. This change affected the animal and vegetable kingdoms equally, marking in fact a Great Divide in the terrestrial biological record. From a uniformitarian standpoint, this was a truly extraordinary occurrence representing a real catastrophe. So widespread is the evidence for these changes, and so apparently indiscriminate the annihilation of diverse animal groups, that the closing stages of the Pleistocene period might justifiably be styled an age of wholesale slaughter. In the words of Prof L C Eiseley, the phenomenon drives &quot;..the biologist to despair as he surveys the extinction of so many species and genera in the closing Pleistocene&quot;. Considering these exterminations further, he added: We are not dealing with a single, isolated relict species but with a considerable variety of Pleistocene forms, all of which must be accorded, in the light of cultural evidence, an approximately similar time of extinction In Europe immense herds of diverse animals utterly vanished off the face of the Earth for no obvious biological reason. They were seemingly virile, numerically strong faunal groups, well adapted to their natural environment, yet, geologically speaking, they disappeared with frightening abruptness. The same biological decimation was enacted simultaneously in Australasia, Asia and Africa. Of the latter G E Pilgrim noted: ...at approximately the same time we witness a similar extinction of the mammal faunas of Africa and Asia, though in their case this may not have been caused by glacial conditions. What conditions could these have been? Conditions acting as effectively outside the alleged limits of the hypothetical polar ice- sheets as within them, and on a hemispheric scale. In the New World, for example, practically the whole Pleistocene mammalian fauna was wiped out or reduced to a pitiful vestige of its former greatness. Among the mammals so affected were: all the camels, all the horses, all the ground sloths, two genera of musk-oxen, peccaries, certain antelopes, a giant bison with a horn spread of six feet, a giant beaver-like animal, a stag-moose and several kinds of cats, some of which were of lion-size Additions to this list include several types of elephants, including the mammoth and the mastodon (though a few individuals are known to have survived Pleistocene times in North America), all the northern rhinoceroses, giant armadillos, several kinds of bear, numerous members of the canine family, tapirs, a variety of rodents, and various large flightless birds. Coincident with this dreadful slaughter upon the land was the deposition far inland of myriads of contemporary marine shells, and the stranding at great elevations of marine marnmals such as whales, porpoises, walruses and seals. Elsewhere, vast forests were flattened and buried under equally vast accumulations of sand or mud or piled up in broken and twisted heaps. At some localities plant remains were packed so densely and in such abundance as to form lignite (soft brown coal akin to peat) beds of great extent, while at others animal and plant remains were mixed together in inexpressible confusion as heterogeneous masses. In Alaska, for example, thick frozen deposits of volcanic ash, silts, sands, boulders, lenticles and ribbons of unmelted ice, and countless relics of late Pleistocene animals and plants lie jumbled together in no discernible order, This amazing deposit, usually referred to as `muck', has been described by Dr Rainey as containing: enormous numbers of frozen bones of extinct animals, such as the mammoth,

mastodon, super bison and horse, as well as brush, stumps, moss and freshwater molluscs. Hibben described these deposits in very similar language: In many places, Alaskan muck is packed with animal bones and debris in trainload lots. Bones of mammoths, mastodons, several kinds of bison, horses, wolves, bears, and lions tell a story of a fauna] population... within this frozen mass lie the twisted parts of animals and trees intermingled with lenses of ice and layers of peat and mosses. It looks as though in the midst of some cataclysmic catastrophe of ten thousand years ago the whole Alaskan world of living animals and plants was suddenly frozen in mid-motion in a grim charade. ln another publication, the same author commented: Although the formation of the deposits of muck is not clear, there is ample evidence that at least portions of this material were deposited under catastrophic conditions. Mammal remains are for the most part dismembered and disarticulated, even though some fragments yet retain, in their frozen state, portions of ligaments, skin, hair and flesh. Twisted and torn trees are piled in splintered masses... at least four considerable layers of volcanic ash may be traced in these deposits, although they are extremely warped and distorted. Hibben also suggested that this volcanic ash contributed to the wholesale death and destruction we have been reviewing. He wrote: One of the most interesting theories of the themselves, are layers of volcanic ash. There is no doubt that coincidental with the end of the Pleistocene animals, at least in Alaska, there were volcanic eruptions of tremendous proportions... Toxic clouds of gas from volcanic upheavals could well cause death on a gigantic scale... We shall later have a few words to say about late Pleistocene vulcanicity worldwide, so we

merely mention here that at least 76 major volcanoes, both currently active and recently extinct, exist today in the Aleutian islands immediately south-west of Alaska alone. Many of these appear to have been active around late Pleistocene times. Hibben's observations also introduce the element of great heat into the argument surrounding the problematical origin of the so-called Ice Age. Discussing the problem from the viewpoint of physics, the celebrated Victorian physicist John Tyndall, as long ago as 1883, stressed that &quot;...the enormous extension of glaciers in bygone ages demonstrates just as rigidly, the operation of heat as well as the action of cold&quot; Although Tyndall has since been proved wrong on some counts, his remarks respecting great heat required for the formation of widespread ice-sheets are still correct and have been upheld by nearly all later geophysicists. Among these was Dr Donald Menzel of Harvard who, after examining the problem from an astronomical viewpoint, opined: If solar variability caused the ice ages, I should prefer to believe that increased warmth brought them on, whereas a diminution of heat caused them to stop' So, even if they really existed, the huge ice-sheets of Pleistocene times needed great heat for their formation, an element conceivably provided by many volcanoes erupting simultaneously. Such an event, if it actually occurred, must also have generated tremendous atmospheric pollution and hurricane force winds. That it did occur seems to be indisputably established from the massive late Pleistocene volcanism traceable not only in Alaska hut, as shown later, in many other regions both north and south of the equator. Such extensive vulcanism have obviously been due to some still more fundamental cause.

The frightful hurricanes just alluded to were doubtless primary factors in the demise of so much insect and bird life during late Pleistocene times -- for what agency other than extremely violent winds could have brought together in one place such dissimilar avian species as the following? They included :Grebes, herons, bitterns, storks, wood ibises, spoonbills, swans, various geese (including the snow goose), ducks, American vultures, kites, many kinds of hawks, falcons, eagles, caracaras, the Teratornis, quails, cranes, partridges, turkeys, rails, gallinules, parrots, coots, plovers, turnstones, woodcock, snipes, surf-- scooters, stilts, sandpipers, barn owls, seven other owl species, flycatchers, woodpeckers, swallows, jays, crows, magpies, titmice, chickadees, ravens, mockingbirds, waxwings, thrashers, meadowlarks, shrikes, two species of blackbird, redwings, orioles, finches, sparrows and buntings. Remains of all these birds were discovered in the late Pleistocene tar-seeps at McKittrick in California, and the asphalt pits at Rancho La Brea in the same state.

This extraordinary assemblage is not an isolated freak occurrence. In late Pleistocene deposits at San Pedro, also in California, the following mixed bird assemblage was found with the remains of camel, bison, a ground-sloth, various rodents and the mammals known as Fe/is, Mega/onyx and Aenocyon: loon, ancient murrolet, black-footed albatross, black-vented shearwater, fulmar, Brandt's cormorant, green-winged teal, mallard duck, cinnamon teal, white-fronted goose, surfscooter, Californian quail, turkey vulture and western meadowlark. All but the first, second and fourth species are still in existence, although like the equivalents from Rancho La Brea and McKittrick they are now spread over many different latitudes and occupy very different habitats. It is more than probable that most if not all these birds never originally dwelt together in the places where we now find their bones. They were brought together from various directions involuntarily by irresistible winds and buried in a common grave by, it would appear, catastrophic agencies Again, how does one correlate the extremely varied remains in the lignite' deposits at Geiseltal in Germany with the theory of uniformity? Although now regarded as partially of Tertiary and partially of Pleistocene age~, the tropical plants, insects and animals embedded in them do not square with the equivalents typical of the steppe conditions often stated to have been

characteristic of that latitude during late Pleistocene times. the amazing preservation of the soft parts of many of these organisms suggests a very recent origin of the entire assemblage. The insect fauna, for example, is a modern one. It occurs &quot;...in present Africa, in East Asia and in America in various regions. preserved in almost original purity&quot; Complete insects, however, are rarities. The vast majority have been torn apart -- and suddenly at that, because the process of fossilization of all surviving parts with silica invading the tissues must have been virtually instantaneous, and was undoubtedly responsible for preserving the membranes and original colours of these insects so marvelously For the vertebrated animals (animals with a spinal column) these lignites are a veritable graveyard. The bones of giant constrictor snakes, East African salamanders, crocodiles, South American condor, an Indo-Australian bird, marsupial mammals, apes, as well as, paradoxically, mammals from northern steppe habitats, lie buried together in no particular order. The plant remains are also perplexing. Fungi and algae still attached to leaves impressed into the lignites are today found only on plants in Brazil, the Cameroons and Java Chlorophyll is also preserved in many of the leaves which, numbering literally billions, form huge beds within these lignites. The leaves belong to plants from all parts of the world, not just from one or two climatic zones only. The leaves are also mostly shredded so that only their fine fibers or nervous systems remain intact. The fibers often retain their original green (chlorophyllic) colour, and indicate that the leaves must have been rapidly excluded from contact with air and light, and buried almost immediately they were stripped from the parent plants. Many of the plant species concerned still flourish in the tropics today. Only some tremendous hurricane acting in concert with vast surging masses of water could have transported and accumulated these remains at Geiseltal -- a hurricane and a deluge operating on a scale and with a ferocity far beyond that of which modern humanity has any experience. These remarkable faunal and floral assemblages at McKittrick, Rancho La Brea and Geiseltal form singular parallels with the aforementioned shell assemblages found in the `drift' at Moel Tryfaen in North Wales. Further examples, not detailed here, are also known from other parts of the world. The process responsible for these effects clearly operated not only at many widelysundered localities and at more or less the same point in Earth history, but affected plants, invertebrates, insects and land, sea and air animals equally. In other words, it acted globally and indiscriminately. Allied with the phenomena found in Alaska, a repeating pattern of wholesale destruction, often involving organisms which could never have lived in the vicinity of huge icesheets, emerges worldwide. It was a time when appalling carnage and tremendous natural disturbances occurred hand in hand. Put bluntly, it was a time of unbridled turmoil.

Evidence From The Artic

Not as spectacular, perhaps, as the animal fossils discovered in Alaska and Siberian Russia, the equivalent botanical evidence from the Arctic is nevertheless of similar importance. Above all, it represents essentially sedentary life which mostly lived and died where its remains now occur. Adapted to well-defined climatic Zones and a Ititud inal habitats, plants faithfully reflect the meteorological conditions which must have formerly prevailed where their fossils now repose. Taken as a whole, the flora constitutes a natural living background against which normally more mobile life-forms -- for example, insects, molluscs and vertebrated animals live and die. Plant cover in one form or another is virtually a prerequisite haven for such mobile organisms and, amongst other things, functions locally as a partial humidity control. Its importance for other lifeforms cannot be over-emphasized. The former existence of a warm, equable region traditionally sited somewhere in the north -- often specifically at or near the North Pole itself -- would, we may reasonably infer, have been clothed with abundant vegetation by the very nature of such a climatic regime. Much irrefutable evidence indicates that it was so. Palaeo-botanists are well aware that a milder climate formerly prevailed throughout much of the present Arctic. Numerous discoveries of warmth-loving plant remains assigned a Miocene or Pliocene date

have been made at many northern localities, including Spitzbergen, the east and west coasts of Greenland, the islands comprising Kong Karl Land, Ellesmere Island, Banks Island and Alaska. Virtually identical remains occur on the Kamchatka peninsula of eastern Siberia, now lying well south of the Arctic Circle. Further consideration of these remains leads to some interesting conclusions. Early scientific expeditions to Spitzbergen discovered and collected 136 specimens of Miocene plants representing species of fir, spruce, marsh cypress, hazel, elm, sequoia, liquidambar, gingkos, tulip trees, magnolia and freshwater plants. A similar picture came to light near Disko island off western Greenland where pine cones, acorns and other plants were discovered last century. Further finds elsewhere in Arctic America concerned temperate-zone trees such as walnut, beech, oak, poplar, lime -- some with fruit still on the branches -- maple, magnolia, cypress, plane trees and conifers. Some remains represented tropical ferns and the breadfruit. More than 30 species of Con~ferae have been found, including several sequoias (allied to the gigantic Wellingtonia of California)... also beeches, oaks, planes, maples, walnuts, limes and even a Magnolia... andromeda, hazel, blackthorn, holly, dogwood and hawthorn. A species of zamia (zamites) grew in the swamps, with potatnogeton, sparganium and ineuyanthes, while ivy and vines twined round the forest trees, and broad-leaved ferns grew beneath their shade. Even in Spitzbergen, as far north as latitude 78°, no less than 95 species of fossil plants have been obtained, including hazel, poplar, alder, beech, plane-tree and lime. Such a vigorous growth of trees within 12° of the Pole, where now a dwarf willow and a few herhaceous plants form the only vegetation and where the ground is covered with almost perpetual snow and ice, is truly remarkable. The identity of so many of the fossils with Miocene species of central Europe not only proves that the climate of Greenland was much warmer than it is now, hut also renders it probable that a much more uniform climate prevailed over the entire Northern Hemisphere. Though still exceptional, the frozen Siberian animal carcasses were, as they belonged to species also entombed uufrozeii in geologically youthful `drift' deposits else-- where, quickly regarded as being similarly youthful. Geologists have established that a similar modernity characterized the shattering, collapse and upheaval of many sizable portions of the Earth's crust, as well as the concomitant elevations of most of our planet's highest mountain ranges. It is clear that before the onset of these disturbances world topography differed appreciably from that of today The Alps were simply `a chain of low hills'; the proto-Rockies, if they truly existed, were actually located considerably farther west; the Gobi desert was allegedly a great inland sea. A full list of these changes is impressively long and everywhere reflects the effects of a worldwide catastrophe. Palaeontologists and biologists have likewise reached generally similar conclusions respecting the demise of countless plants and animals on all continents `at the close of the Pleistocene epoch'. Extinctions then were sudden, violent, frighteningly wholesale, indiscriminate and very extensive. The refrigerated evidence of warm/temperate vegetation from Arctic lands independently and strikingly supports that scenario, and suggests that some alteration of the axial tilt of the Earth may have attended the aforementioned crustal disturbances. They also intimate that the earliest histories which refer to remotely ancient times epitomised by a Golden Age may, after all, allude to some long-forgotten reality Evidence thus converges from numerous directions to support the conclusion that, on / the testimony of radio--carbon and other dating techniques, immense physical and climatic changes occurred. The collective and unavoidable message of these and other innumerable details is that, at some stage, colossal masses of water played a very important (although not the only) role in effecting these changes. This again suggests that the many surviving accounts of a worldwide Deluge long ago may yet be found to rest upon a substratum of now dimly-remembered fact.

The Testimony of Biology

Extensive lignite beds representing luxuriant vegetation, and containing the bones of mammoth, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, bear and other contemporary animals, underlie and are overlain by `drift' deposits. Some of these lignites -- or brown coal are so youthful that wood debris in them is sometimes found. Numerous central European plants in so-called Ice Age times were thus clearly warmtemperate species hardly differing from those still thriving there today; and they were accompanied by mainly herbivorous animals.

Many discoveries in west European `drift' deposits have concerned the remains of large maple and coniferous trees. The latter, especially, have been repeatedly encountered in Britain. At Wawne in Holderness, for example, drainage works last century exposed a buried forest, composed mainly of &quot;gigantic pines'.' ; while others, lying horizontally 9ft (2.8m) below ground level, in company with the bones of horse, hippopotamus, mammoth, red deer and bovids, were found near Leeds in Yorkshire in 1852 Innumerable roots of enormous size and the prostrate trunks of giant fir, oak, alder and hazel trees-- complete in some instances with leaves, berries and nuts -- mixed with mammoth bones, were discovered under thick layers of peaty-earth at low-tide level on the shore between Sutton and Cleethorpes last century The Rev Edward Trollope, who reported these finds, contended that a great flood had overwhelmed these organisms.

These and numerous similar discoveries all over Europe reveal a now largely vanished flora which was formerly far more varied than its few surviving members, and which, in geologically very recent times, extended much further north than it could do so today.

Buried Forests of North America

Buried Logs at a depth of 20 ft in Ohio Great beds of timber occur at several places in Mercer County, Ohio, between 40 and 5Oft (12m and 15m) from the surface, and half-decayed logs were, quite commonly found while sinking

wells on the upland farms in nearby Sciota County. Closely similar finds were made at varying depths in Madison, Franklin, and Stark counties, showing that .muck beds and trees are universal beneath the soil throughout Ohio.

The extent of these buried forests clearly outstretches even that of the sizable state of Ohio. For instance, well-preserved willow remains came to light in red clay 5Oft (15m) below the present surface of Lake Michigan, in a well sunk at Green Bay, Wisconsin, while further north abundant decayed vegetation has been found under similar circumstances on Oak Island at the western extremity of Lake Superior.

Several years ago, at the site of Two Creeks, Wisconsin, abundant remains of large forest trees were discovered buried under deposits attributed to the Mankato glacier, laboratory Carbon14 tests on spruce wood and associated peat from the site reduced their antiquity to, significantly, only 11,000 years BP Elsewhere in Wisconsin, decayed and universalized white cedar wood has been found 18 ft (5.5m) down in a well shaft in Walworth County, while at Appleton township unrotted red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) occurred at the same depth. Yet other finds could be listed from neighboring Mississippi and Indiana, although the many examples just cited adequately convey the immense, and probably more or less continuous, extent of this buried vegetation. Together with the stupendous volumes of plant debris forming the previousry-mentioned Canadian lignite deposits north of the Great Lakes, these discoveries west and south of the Great Lakes in effect constitute one gigantic raft of subterranean botanical rubbish -- the remnants of once vast forests of mixed conifers and deciduous timber, overwhelmed and deeply buried by whatever deposited the even more gargantuan volumes of `drift' all over mid-western America and southern Canada. Before their destruction, however, these forests extended much further north than is possible today. A great number of North American ants are identical with European ones... Northern Europe possesses one peculiar genus of Ant -- Anergetes. This is closely allied to Epoccus, another genus confined to North America... 487 species of Coleoptera are common to North America, Northern Asia and Europe. The restriction of the water-mite Hydrachna geographica -- a creature with limited powers of flight -- to Europe and eastern North America is still another example, which also parallels the distribution of the freshwater sponge Hetermeyenia ryderi, thriving today only along the North American Atlantic coast (between Florida, Newfoundland, and Sable Island) and western Scotland and Ireland. Among annelids, the occurrence of similar earthworms in the Canaries and southern Europe represents further powerful evidence for an uninterrupted land connection between those regions at no very remote date, for, like the slugs and most land-shells, earthworms soon perish if consigned to seawater. The same fate befalls similarly immersed frogs, toads and newts, yet the presence of several identical or related species of these amphibians in water-sundered Sardinia, Corsica and the British Isles suggests that these islands, too, were recently united to the European mainland. The closing event in the history of the great sea that in comparatively recent times covered so large a part of Asia, extended from the pole to the Caspian and Black Seas, and from the Ural mountains to near the Great Wall of China, was the disappearance of its waters from the long trough that reaches from the shores of the Arctic sea, through the Barabinsky steppe to the AraloCaspian depression. That the Caspian Sea once extended to the Aral and Black seas, and that all three are vestiges of that ancient Miocene Ocean which bathed the northern shore of the old Tyrrhenian continent has long been established. Certainly the sediments deposited by this huge body of water are traceable for immense distances. They reach at least as far north as the River Kama in Central Russia

Mediterranean Grave Yards

The draining of the old Miocene Ocean was sudden, violent and catastrophic. The displacement of its waters, in fact, constituted a disaster of the first magnitude. In few regions are the effects of

this displacement more riveting than at various places around the present Mediterranean basin. Especially remarkable are the caves and fissures. After exploring the Sicilian cave of Maccagnone, Dr Hugh Falconer reported: ...the cavern had been filled right to the roof, the uppermost layer consisting of a concrete of shells, bone-splinters, with burnt clay, flint-chips, bits of charcoal and hyena coprolites, which was cemented to the roof by stalagmatic infiltration.., of contemporaneous origin... A great physical alteration... occurred to the conditions previously existing, emptying out the whole of the loose, incoherent contents, and leaving only... portions agglutinated to the roof. The wreck of these ejecta being visible in the patches of ceneri impastati, containing fossil bones, below the mouth of the cavern.

Elsewhere in Sicily, in the hills around Palermo, veritable hecatombs of hippopotamus bones have been found. As much as twenty tons of these bones were shipped from around the... cave of San Ciro, Palermo, within the first six months of

exploiting them, and they were so fresh that they were sent to Marseilles to furnish animal charcoal for use in sugar factories... The bones were those of animals of all ages down to the foetus, nor do they show traces of weathering or exposure. The freshness of these bones and the presence of very young individuals shows that some sudden and geologically recent cataclysm was responsible for their accumulation. In Prestwich's opinion the causative agent was an immense flood which, at its nadir, submerged the British Isles, the whole of Central Europe and the Mediterranean islands of Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and Malta. Reconstructing the event, Prestwich wrote:

The animals in the plains of Palermo naturally retreated, as the waters advanced, deeper into the amphitheatre of hills until they found themselves embayed... the animals must have thronged together in vast multitudes, crushing into more accessible caves and swarming over the ground at their entrance, until overtaken by thewaters and destroyed... Rocky debris and large blocks from the sides of the hills were hurled down

by the current of water, crushing and smashing the bones Prestwich also added that it was: &quot;...impossible to account for the... phenomena ...by any agency of which our time has offered us experience... The agency, whatever it was, must have acted with sufficient violence to smash the bones&quot; `~. Among the animals found at Maccagnone were hyaena, lion, a large bear and the ancient straighttusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus). These flourished alongside the aforementioned hippopotami, one of which (Hippopotamus pent/and!) was a dwarf form also known from coeval deposits on Malta, Crete, mainland Greece, Cyprus and in the cave of Santa Teresa near Spezzia in northern Italy. Abundant remains of full-sized hippopotami have also been discovered in other Sicilian caves and rock-fissures&quot;', habitats hippopotami now seldom frequent. Their occurrence in caves and fissures, frequently too small to accommodate even one individual, is mystifying until it is realized that these animals did not live where their bones now repose but were transported en masse to these sites from more distant localities. Also of much interest was the discovery in a cavern at Luparello, near Palermo, of the bones of a dwarf species of Palaeoloxodon, P mnaidriensis, a form better known from specimens found on Malta. The old torrent bed of Benghisa on Malta abounds in breccia-filled fissures. Excavated last century these produced irrefrangible evidence that the breccias and the innumerable bones they contained had been deposited under exceptionally violent conditions. Among the large blocks of fresstone, either impacted or strewn in a heterogeneous manner, were lying seemingly entire skeletons of elephants, some of the skulls and jaws furnishing good

evidence of the rough usage they had sustained by being broken and crushed flat by blocks which, with the force of impact, had cracked the others on which they impinged. These conditions were beautifully illustrated in the cases of thigh and pelvis bones, which had been smashed to pieces by blocks falling on them... Entire skeletons of the dormice (of a gigantic extinct genus) were found between blocks as if their bodies had sunk into the hollows as they floated past, whilst fragments of large birds' bones and traces of a huge fresh-water turtle, and several vertebrae and skulls of lizards, as large as a chamaelon, were found in conjunction with... land-shells... the appearance presented by this remarkable collection of organic remains seems... to indicate that water at one time flowed down the gap, arid was subject to occasional extraordinary deluges which bore down the large blocks and whatever exuviae came within reach. Dolomieu, an early observer, concluded that a great wave had passed over Malta,

near overwhelmed its animal denizens and washed off all its superficial soil (which accounted for the island's bare aspect). Admiral Spratt later reached similar conclusions Like the Sicilian bones, the tortoise and turtle remains found in these fissures appear to have been conveyed thence from some other unidentified locality by a large body of water which: &quot;...at one time overflowed the greater portion of the eastern half of the island&quot; Dr Leith Adams concluded that this deluge proceeded from a northern direction' that it had cast whole carcasses into the fissure at Mnaidra, and that, due to the exceptional freshness of their bones, many animals had been entombed in the flesh, albeit in dismembered condition185. This applied particularly to the remains of pygmy elephants which, as with the Sicilian hippopotami, represented individuals of every age from infant to adult':

In a little crevice in the eastern wall of the Mnaidra Gap in Malta not three feet either way, among enormous quantities of fossil land-shells, lay the two detached lower jaw bones of possibly the smallest of the two pygmy elephants, and under them portions of the spinal column with ribs in situ... The finding of fragments of pubic bones, and of vertebrae in their natural order of succession, and in a linear direction, shows clearly that there must have been several of the elephants introduced in the flesh. As previously seen, similar dismemberment characterized many of the coeval faunas now occupying the Alaskan `muck' beds and we shall encounter them again sporadically over huge areas of Eurasia, North and South America and Australasia. These animals were not dismembered by natural predators, but by something acting just before or during their burial on quite literally a hemispheric scale. Significantly, pygmy elephants, which appear to have been so prominent in the land fauna of the Tyrrheriian landmass, today only exist in the Congo basin. Similarly, the only living pygmy hippopotamus, Hippopotamus liberiensis, is now confined to West Africa. The aforementioned gigantic dormice of Malta tell a parallel story. Adams observed that:

...their wholesale destruction at all ages of their existence, from the new-born to the aged (was clearly synchronous with) the wholesale destruction of the pachyderms... The rationale of finding such vast quantities of dormice and bird's bones, either... in fragmentary states or... entire, along with uninjured bones of elephants, or below or between blocks of stone in the old torrent-bed of Benghisa, together with their presence in almost every similar ossiferous deposit in the islands, seems to me conclusive that they cannot be accepted as representing the usual casuals from natural decay, but when taken in conjunction with what has been previously stated, they afford very strong circumstantial evidence that the extinction of the land fauna of the period was

brought about by changes in the physical geography of the area.

Excavations conducted a few years later by A A Caruana in the Maltese fissure of IsShantun revealed similar indiscriminate exterminations. Many `Pleistocene' elephant bones and molars, including one of a pygmy species, were found mixed up with numerous bird bones and sharks' teeth. Miocene sharks were the largest which ever lived, and included the monstrous Carcharodon, one species of which, possessing distinctive triangular teeth up to 8&quot; long, may have had a 6--7ft wide jaw gape, and probably attained a length of 80ft. Significantly, several smaller species of Carcharodon persisted down to

late `Pleistocene' times, and one, in effect still a `Miocene' form, continues to do so off the eastern coast of Asia. Very interestingly therefore, non-fossilised teeth, 5&quot; long and larger than in any known living shark, and essentially identical to those of the Miocene species, have been dredged up from the seafloor

off Australia. They represent a shark which, according to Dr David Stead, must have been &quot;80-- 9Oft long&quot; `Pleistocene' land animals, including the aforementioned refrigerated mammoth and rhinoceros carcasses, and that various rock fissures in the Jura mountains and along the north coastline of the present Mediterranean are filled with fossils of Pliocene and `Pleistocene' marine organisms -. We have already noted that Tyrrhenia, apparently submerged at the end of `Pleistocene' limes -- or even in earliest Holocene times the equivalent of Forrest's &quot;since the Ice Age&quot; dating for the disappearance of ancient Atlantic landmasses -- was well populated by a great variety of `Pleistocene' and Pliocene animals. The repeated paralleling of so many disparate details on a near-hemispheric basis within the same segment of time is surely not fortuitous. Fissures in the side of a barren, truncated mountain, having a base a mile in circumference, situated near the village of Cerigo, on the Adriatic island of that name, contain a veritable graveyard of bones. Known locally as the `mountain of bones', this eminence is covered from its base to its summit, both within and without, by the remains of a wide range of `Pleistocene' animals

Crete is another Mediterranean island in places honeycombed with limestone caves and fissures, yielding the bony remains of a large and interesting Pleistocene' fauna. This included rodents and pygmy elephants, from a cave near Cape Maleka, bones, horns, and teeth of antelopes and deer from a cavern on the promontory of Kutni, numerous rodent bones from a cave at Sphinari, and fragments of pygmy hippopotami in a hillside cave near Melato. Remains of similar animals, together with those of ruminants and a species of elephant occurred in another in the Bay of Kharoumis. Widespread water action has been advocated for the extinction and burial of all these

animals/. A very similar story unfolds in the western Mediterranean. Late `Pleistocene' bone-breccia in caves and fissures on Corsica, Sardinia and the Balearic islands contain the fossil remains of a wide variety of animals that, in many instances, are actually typical late Tertiary (Miocene and Pliocene) forms. Indeed, when these fossils were first studied it was supposed that the breccias were likewise of Tertiary date, but subsequent studies of some of the rodents and molluscs disclosed their undoubted `Pleistocene' age. Once again, therefore, we find -~ on these islands -- an ancient (Tertiary) fauna persisting down to the close of `Pleistocene' times. The event which submerged Tyrrhenia and choked caves and fissures on the aforenamed Mediterranean islands with animal remains also visited North Africa and the Iberian peninsula, similarly overwhelming the contemporary (`Pleistocene') fauna and flora there. Thus, remains of Palaeoloxodon have been found in Algeria, and at Tangier, and those of the enormous `southern mammoth' (Archidiskodon meridionalis) at Mansoura. Bones and teeth of hippopotami have been unearthed near Constantine and elsewhere in Algeria, others of the woolly rhinoceros (Coe/odonta tichorhinus) at Chetma near Biskra, and those of its constant companion the hairy mammoth (Mammuthus priniigenius) near 0ran. Among other Algerian fossil proboscidean remains, are some apparently of the living African elephant, Loxodonta african us, an unexpected occurrence also parallelled in South African `Pleistocene' deposits.

This Algerian `Pleistocene' fauna also included various gazelles, several cervids like those known from the Corsican fissures210, a series of bovids -- including Bos (Bubalus) antiquus from Djelfa and Sétif~ -- and a number of horses. Of the latter, one, although occurring in `Pleistocene' deposits, strongly resembles the defunct Pliocene horse Equus stenonis, and another possesses teeth reminiscent of those of the earlier Miocene horse Hip parion. Interestingly, Hipparion has been found elsewhere in undoubted late `Pleistocene' deposits. Once again, therefore, the evidence suggests the survival in northwest Africa during late `Pleistocene' times of very ancient animal forms which had died out elsewhere, hut which were there living alongside a rich variety of animals of more modern character.

North of Morocco, the l,3701t (422m) Rock of Gibraltar is extensively fissured and displays old beach lines now some 600ft (185m) above present sea level. As Prestwich once observed, the Rock was: in Quaternary times, an island not more than 800ft, or less, high, which rose by successive stages to its present height. It is more than probable, however, that at some time before it settled at that level, the whole of the area was upheaved to such an extent that a land passage was formed to the African coast. Bones or portions thereof fill these fissures and represent: panther, lynx, caffir-cat, hyaena, wolf, bear, rhinoceros, horse, wild boar, red deer, fallow deer, ibex, ox, hare, rabbit... The bones are most likely broken into thousands of fragments -- none are worn or rolled, nor any of them gnawed, though many carnivores then lived on the rock... A great and common danger, such as a great flood, alone could have driven together the animals of the plains and of the crags and caves. Captain Frederick Brome, one of the principal collector of these remains (which also included many species of birds) reached similar conclusions: The scattered, broken state of everything found, together with the fact that the objects were almost invariably discovered near and under the sides of the cavern and passages, appears to me to indicate that these appearances would only have been caused by some convulsion accompanied by flood.

Nor were the bones rolled or water-worn, and very few showed signs of having been gnawed. They looked, in fact, singularly fresh despite their splintered condition within the breccia Significantly, land and marite shells occurred at all depths down to 290ft (89m) below the surface in one of the fissures , which also yielded pieces of corei. Tons of bones were retrieved from these fissures, but were afterwards largely dispersed and lost to science

Although a few of the originally excavated pieces of bone breccia from Gibraltar have survived, a handful of examples may yet be examined in the Natural History Museum in London and the geological collections at Salisbury, England, and confirm the reported freshness of the remains embedded in them. Later excavations of other Gibraltar caves by, amongst others, testify to the consistently unrolled and fresh appearance of the bones from all the caves explored.

Bones and Breccia From a Gibraltar Cave If upright skeletons and amazingly preserved frozen animals are prominent facets of the `Pleistocene' biological record, so too is the following remarkable evidence from California, South America and Africa. `The Siwalik Hills are in the foothills of the Himalayas, north of Delhi; they extend for several hundred miles and are 2000 to 8000 feet high. In the nineteenth century their unusually rich fossil beds drew the attention of scientists. Animal bones of species and genera, living and extinct, were found there in most amazing profusion. Some of the animals looked as though nature had conducted an abortive experiment with them and had discarded the species as not fit for life. The carapace of a tortoise twenty feet long was found there; how could such an animal have moved on hilly terrain? The Etephas ganesa, an elephant species found in the Siwalik Hills, had tusks about fourteen feet long and over three feet in circumference. One author says of them: It is a mystery how these animals ever carried them, owing to their enorruous size and leverage. The Siwalik fossil beds are stocked with animals of so many and such varied species that the

animal world of today seems impoverished by comparison. It looks as though all these animals invaded the world at one time: The hippopotamus, which &quot;generally is a climatically specialized type&quot; (De Terra), pigs, rhinoceroses, apes, oxen filled the interior of the hills almost to bursting. Many of the genera that comprised a wealth of species were extinguished to the last one; some are still represented, but by only a few species. Of nearly thirty species of elephants found in the Siwalik beds, only one species has survived in India. &quot;The sudden and widespread reduction by extinction of the Siwalik mammals is a most startling event for the geologist as well as the biologist. The great carnivores, the varied races of elephants belonging to no less than 25 to 30 species. . . the numerous tribes of large and highly specialized ungulates [hoofed animals] which found such suitable habitats in the Siwalik jungles. Thirteen hundred miles from the Siwalik Hills, in central Burma, the deposits cut by the Irrawaddy River &quot;may reach 10,000 feet.&quot; &quot;Two fossiliferous horizons occur m this series separated by about 4000 feet of sands.&quot; The upper horizon (bed), characterized by mastodon, hippopotamus, and ox, is similar to one of the beds in the Siwaliks. The sediments are remarkable for the large quantities of fossil-wood associated with them. . Hundreds and thousands of entire trunks of silicified trees and huge logs lying in the sandstones suggest the denudation of &quot;thickly forested&quot; areas. Animals met death and extinction by the elementary forces of nature, which also uprooted forests and from Kashmir to Indo-China threw sand over species and genera in mountains thousands of feet high. THE SAHARA DESERT, which stretches from the Nile to the Atlantic Ocean across the continent of Africa and covers 3,500,000 square miles, about the area of all of Europe, is the greatest desert on earth. What is now the desert of Sahara was an open grassland or steppe in earlier days. Drawings on rock of herds of cattle, made by early dwellers in this region, were discovered by Barth in 1850. Since then many more drawings have been found. The animals depicted no longer inhabit these regions, and many are generally extinct. It is asserted that the Sahara once had a large human population that lived in vast green forests and on fat pasture lands. Neolithic implements, vessels and weapons made of polished stone, were found close to the drawings. Such drawings and implements were discovered in the eastern as well as the western Sahara. Men lived in these &quot;densely populated&quot; (Flint) regions and cattle pastured where today enormous expanses of sand stretch for thousands of miles. It appears that a large part of the region was occupied by an inland lake, or vast marsh, known to the ancients as Lake Triton. In a stupendous catastrophe the lake emptied itself into the Atlantic, and the sand on its bottom and shores was left behind, forming a desert when tectonic movements sealed off the springs that fed the lake. The land of pastures and forests&quot; became a desert of sand; hippopotami that live in water and elephants disappeared, and with them also the hunter and the farmer. The Sahara itself is considered to be the bed of an ancient sea, part of the ocean. In Algeria and Tunisia geodetic surveys made by the French government showed that the depression formed by the Shotts (shallow, marshy lakes) of Algeria and Tunisia were below sea level and would fill up with water if a series of protective coastal dunes were removed.&quot; The geological research and drilling of the past twenty years have made it possible to discover traces of the biggest geological catastrophe in the history of our planet, and to reconstruct its details. This catastrophe affected the whole coast of the Mediterranean Sea, i.e. places where the cultures of the Old World--Egyptian, Cretan, Greek, and Roman-- subsequently arose. Soviet geologists studying the structure of the Nile Valley in connection with the Aswan Dam began the discovery of this stupendous geological event. Drilling established that the Nile Valley, filled with riverine deposits, is more than a kilometre deep. I.S. Chumakov, who compared these data with the previously known findings of drilling in the Rhine Valley in the South of France, put forward the idea in 1965 that the level of the Mediterranean was a thousand metres or more lower at the end of the Miocene epoch than it is now, and later suddenly rose. In 1970 his hypothesis was confirmed by drilling from the research ship Glomar Challenger.

We can now quite reliably reconstruct the situation that led to a gigantic flood when, after several decades or few centuries, the basin of the Mediterranean was filled by water several kilometres deep. In the Miocene epoch, This region and the land lying to the north of it were covered by the sea. At the end of the epoch, as the result of a certain drop in the level of the ocean, the Mediterranean basin was separated from the rest of the ocean, and its link with the Atlantic, which then through a strait in Southern Spain in the area of the Guadaiquiver Valley and a strait in Africa in northern Morocco, was closed. The Mediterranean now evaporates more water, than it receives from the rivers that flow into it. Its level is maintained by sea water flowing through the Strait of Gibraltar. At the end of the Miocene the waters of the closed Mediterranean evaporated even faster, and gradually only small isolated lakes remained on the site of the deep marine basin, lakes in which saliferous and gypsiferous sediments were laid down resembling the deposits of modern dried-up lakes in desert areas (the Sahara, Gobi, Kara-Kum, etc.). These deposits, discovered by the boreholes of the Glomar Challenger, have been named the Messina suite. At the time the level of the inland drainage lakes on the floor of the Mediterranean was 1500 metres below sea level. rflle lowering of the level of the water in it through evaporation led to down-cutting by the rivers flowing into it. For that reason the valleys of all the rivers of the Mediterranean basin were deep canyons with sides up to 1000 metres high, and in places more. The huge basin, almost entirely without water, had an unusual climate, such as has never occurred again. Its bottom lay 1000 to 1500 metres and more below sea level, so that it consequently had a very high atmospheric pressure, much higher than that at sea level. In those conditions the temperature of the air, too, was higher than any existing on Earth. In summer months it was probably as high as 60 or 70 °C, and we can suppose that only certain types of plant and animal could survive in such conditions. It is probable that the river valleys and shores of the bitter salt lakes of this curious world were populated by animals only in winter. The animal kingdom was already to some extent similar to the contemporary one; the plains and mountains around the Mediterranean were the habitat of grazing and predatory mammals, birds, and other animals. Some probably descended to the dried-up floor of the basin in search of food. There is no such big waterless basin on Earth now, but the phenomenon is still observable today in miniature in the basin of the Dead Sea in the eastern, most arid part of the Mediterranean. The floor of this basin is 392 metres below the level of the Mediterranean. The River Jordan, which flows into the Dead Sea, does not bring enough water to make up for the loss through evaporation. Consequently, only a bitter salt lake is preserved like that which existed on the site of the present Mediterranean. If a canal `were cut between the Mediterranean and the Dead Sea we would be able to reconstruct in miniature the conditions of the catastrophe that occurred. Where the Straits of Gibraltar are now, there `was a fault. River flows gradually eroded this zone, weakened by fractures, and in time it was deepened sufficiently for the waters of the Atlantic to pour into the Mediterranean basin. In a calculable time the flow of sea water widened the channel to 12 kilometres, and deepened it to nearly 400 metres. Scientists estimate that it took less than a thousand years to fill the Mediterranean with water from the Atlantic, and that it possibly took only a few centuries. Consequently its level rose between two and five metres a year. At first the waters flooded the bottoms of the dried up lakes; then they poured over the shallow coastal areas, and finally rushed into the deep valleys of the rivers, penetrating along them for hundreds of kilometres deep into the African and European continents. It should not be forgotten that before the deluge, the bottom of the Mediterranean consisted of many isolated basins lying at different levels. Consequently at the beginning of the flood the bursting of water from one depression to another could have occurred almost instantly, the water filling the low parts of the depressions in a matter of days and weeks.

If the Mediterranean had been populated then as it is now, the consequences of the flood would have been ghastly, everyone would have been drowned by the waters. Even at the beginning of the Pliocene epoch, when this flood occurred, we can assume that many animals perished from it, primarily those that were on the floor of the basin and tried to save themselves on the existing eminences. These eminences, turning into islands, rapidly shrank in area, and ultimately became gigantic graveyards of animals. The deluge was not the sole manifestation of the catastrophe. Soon after the waters filled the bottom of the basin, terrible earthquakes began along its periphery. Never has our planet experienced such ~ huge number of seismic catastrophes simultaneously. In the case of the Mediterranean deluge the depth of the inrushing water was dozens of times greater than in the biggest reservoirs. The main point, however, was that the water filled a vast area and was millions of cubic kilometres in volume. The crust of the Mediterranean basin must have down-warped by 300 to 500 metres under the additional weight of water. At the same time the bordering crust of Africa and Europe remained at its former level. As a consequence there were marked displacements of it along the boundary between the Mediterranean and the continents. Earthquakes regularly occurred along these faults whose strength was measurable by the biggest scale known to us, and possibly much greater. They also continued for a long time after filling of the basin. MEDITERRANEAN ONCE DRIED UP &quot;Many years ago the Mediterranean Sea vanished. The arm of the ocean that previously had separated Europe from Africa suddenly dried out, exposing an immense ,irregular trench in the earth's crust 2000 miles long and as much as a mile deep. On its hot, airless floor lay a string of shallow briny lakes, rimmed with white deposits of salt... for the most part this gigantic furrow in the earths surface was roastingly hot and almost lifeless. The evidence to support this astounding vision ... was hauled up from the depths in 1970 by scientists working on the American research ship, the Glomar Challenger. The distribution of these different salt minerals in the rocks of the Mediterranean sea--floor convincingly supported the hypothesis that the sea had been reduced to a group of shrinking salt lakes. In some places the salt was measured by echo sounding devices to be over 5000 ft thick in some places.. .the salt is predominately anhydrite. Halite and other soluble salts, such as potash and magnesium salts which only crystalize when waters are at their briniest, are largely restricted to the deepest part of the basin where the last remnants of the evaporating salt lakes would have lain.. Further corroboration that the sea had once vanished came from geological facts. The river Rhone in southern France flows through a plain of sands and gravels ,but buried far beneath these deposits cut into the granite bedrock ,lies a deep channel. It can be traced down the Rhone valley, sinking ever deeper as it goes until the Mediterranean coast it is 3000 feet below the present sea level. A similar buried channel underlies the valley of the Nile. Five hundred miles upstream at Aswan , it can he detected 700 feet below the present land surface. In the delta, it sinks far beneath the thick layer of sediments deposited by the river. Recently oil geologists located it 8000 feet. Beneath the city of Cairo. The Rhone and ni1e tumbled down steep cliffs onto the floor of the oven hot basin a mile or so below.... Sediments are very thick at the mouth of the Mediterranean. Between Madeira and the mid Atlantic ridge, the thickness of sediment has been measured at 11,600 feet. This 11,600 feet of sediment is the big dump heap from the worlds largest interior sea as waters overflowed through or over the strait of Gibralter. A simular dump heap is at the end of the red sea exit where it has risen above the water t:o form the island of Socotra.

The previously-mentioned asphalt and tar-seeps in California, which contain such a varied assortment of birds, are also the cemeteries for a rich assemblage of late `Pleistocene' faunal and

floral life. The most spectacular discoveries have occurred at Rancho La Brea. There, the remains are packed tightly together into an almost unbelievable conglomeration: &quot;...a bed of bones... in which the number of sabre-tooth and wolf skulls together averaged twenty per cubic yard&quot; So abundant were the remains that between 1906, when systematic excavations first began, and 1931, no fewer than 700 skulls had been retrieved of the sabre-toothed tiger (Smilodon) alone. Accompanying these was a quite staggering profusion of bones and teeth belonging to horses, camels, bison, mastodons, mammoths, rodents, coyotes, wolves, sloths and numerous other mammals and birds. Initially accorded a late Pliocene antiquity, later studies showed these remains to be coeval with late `Pleistocene' plants collected from the Carpinteria asphalts. Very significantly, these plants proved to be typical of a Recent flora now only thriving 200 miles (320km) further north. The exceptional number of animals at Rancho La Brea is usually explained thus: some animal stuck fast in the tar, crying out, attracted mammalian and avian carnivores anxious to secure an easy meal, but these in turn, also becoming ensnared in the sticky trap, joined their hoped for meals, L grim cycle being repeated innumerable times. This interpretation, however, is badly at odds with the facts, for, as Prof Merriam has observed: As the greater number of the animals... have been entrapped in the tar, it is to b presumed that in a large percentage of. cases the major portion of the skeleton has been preserved. Contrary to expectations, connected skeletons are not common.. Admittedly the bones are splendidly preserved as far as their often fragmentary state allows, but are, like their counterparts in the Alaskan `muck' beds: &quot;...broken, mashed, contorted, and mixed in a most heterogeneous mass, such as could never have resulted from the chance trapping and burial of a few stragglers&quot;. These animals were apparently buried violently in an already dismembered condition. Interestingly, a human skull, found among these animals, was assigned to `Ice Age' times as the associated animal remains were of supposedly similar antiquity The skull, however, is typical of normal crania in living Amerindians, a point of particular significance when we come to consider our next Californian discovery Shortly after the mid-nineteenth century discovery of gold in California, a succession of noteworthy finds occurred at several places where auriferous gravels, underlying lava-capped mountain ridges, were mined or tunnelled into for the precious metal. Of these finds Dr G F Wright has left us the following interesting account:

Heaps of Breccia and Fossils from Rancho La Brea

As early as 1863 Dr Snell of Sonora began a systematic collection of animal and human remains from the mines in his vicinity In his collection were several objects marked as `from under Table Mountain', among which was a human jaw... In 1857 Hon Paul Hubbs, of Vallejo... picked a portion of a human skull out of the dirt as it was brought from the Valentine Shaft, under Table Mountain, near Shaw's Flat.., Ten years after, Mr Hubbs more fully detailed the circumstances of the discovery, and

Professor Whitney and Gorham Blake Esq, made special examination of the locality and careful enquiries of the owners of the mine, and satisfied themselves that the bone really came from under the basaltic covering of Table Mountain... All this is preliminary to the famous Calaveras skull The Calaveras skull was found by a certain Mr Mattison during February 1866 next to a petrified conifer 60--8Oft (18--25m) long within gravel in a mine tunnel underlying 40ft (12m) of basalt capping Table Mountain near Altaville. It was originally mistaken for a petrified treestump as it was so encrusted with earth and stony matter. However the appearance of the skull in every way corroborated his (Mattison's) statement. The original incrustation shows that it was not taken from a cave... Fragments of bones and gravel and shells, were so wedged into the cavities of the skull... that there could be no mistake as to the character of the situation in which it was found. Chemical analysis showed that organic matter was nearly absent, and... (that the skull) was in a fossilized condition.

Wright also observed the Calaveras skull, which, if genuine, far antedates anything human which has been discovered in Europe, is not of a particularly Inferior order....

Earlier scholars dated the skull as Pliocene because among other finds made under Table Mountain were the remnants of the typical Pliocene horse Hipparion, not recognized as having survived into late Pleistocene times until much later. Today, the Table Mountain gravels are usually regarded as Pleistocene, while in some quarters the Calaveras skull has, despite much evidence to the contrary, been interpreted as that of a modern rather than a fossil man. Other human remains, reportedly found in another mine tunneled under Table Mountain~, were certainly fossil, being associated with late `Pleistocene' plants and the bones of mastodons and its contemporaries believably deposited by &quot;tumultuous waters Great natural convulsions must also have been responsible for the disposition of whales and other marine creatures on the crests of mountains in various other parts of California. Thus Hay quotes Dr Steven Bowers as stating:

Table Mt near Sonora Calif. In Gold Country

Calaveras Skull From Table Mountain The altitude of the mountain is nearly 6200 feet. The mountain is capped with a layer of volcanic basalt a few hundred feet thick. Under this layer of basalt is a layer of gravel as if it had been an ancient river bed. This layer stretches through the entire mountain. In the 1850's miners recognized this as a sight for gold diggings. Shafts were drilled in from the exposed sides and down from the top into the gravel layers. Gold was discovered but that was not all. Fossil bones of extinct animals of the North American continent were found in large numbers. Among them were great mastodons, mammoths, bison, tapirs, horses, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and camels. The vegetation indicated a lush green foliage. Among these fossils were found artifacts of man and even a human skull. In 1863 Dr. Snell, of Sonora, began a systematic collection of animal and human remains from the mines. A stone utensil, apparently used for grinding, was the only one which Dr. Snell claims to have taken with his own hands from the dirt as it came from the tunnel under the mountain. In 1857 Hon. Paul Hubbs, of Vallejo, California (subsequently a State Superintendent of Public Instruction), picked a portion of a human skull out of the dirt as it was brought from the Valentine shaft, under Table Mountain. Mr. Oliver W. Stevens made an affidavit that he picked with his own hands in 1853 a large stone bowl from a load of dirt which came from a tunnel under Table Mountain. Mr. Llewellyn Pierce also makes affidavit that a certain stone mortar was taken in 1862 from under Table Mountain, 200 feet in from the mouth of the tunnel. In February 1866, Mr. Mattison, one of the owners of the claim, says he took from a tunnel under the basaltic capping of the mountain an object which on account of incrusted earthy and stony material, he thought at first to be a petrified root of a tree but which he discovered to be a human skull (modern type).... The skull was forwarded to the office of the State Survey on the following June (1866). Mr. Mattison has been repeatedly interviewed, and his testimony is uniformly coherent and explicit, to the effect that he took the skull with his own hands from the grave underneath a capping of forty feet of black lava and in connection with drift wood. The appearance of the skull in every way corroborates his statement. The late Dr. Wyman, of Harvard college, and Professor Whitney, together carefully removed the incrustations from the skull. Fragments of bones and gravel and shells were so wedged into the cavities of the skull that there could be no mistake as to

the character of the situation in which it is found. Bones of whales and other cetaceans are met with in various portions of the county [Ventura countyl, especially along the sides and crests of the Santa Paula California mountains. Wyoming grave yards &quot;Today this oddity of nature is not only a tourist curiosity, but furnishing some of the most perfect specimens of fossil fish and plants in the world.... Other than the fish, palm leaves 6-8 ft. long and 3-4 ft. wide have been Uncovered. The occurrence of these confirms the geological theory that the climate was tropical and quite unlike the blizzard-ridden mountains of Wyoming today. This theory was further substantiated in 1890 when an alligator was found. Several fossil Gar-Pike ranging in size from 4-6 ft. have been disentombed as have birds of about the size of domestic chicken and resembling the snipe or plover. In addition, specimens of sunfish, rasptongues, deep sea bass, chubs, pickerel, and herring have been found not to mention mollusca, crustaceans, birds, turtles3 mammals, and many varieties of insects.&quot; (Fishing for Fossils, Compressed Air Magazine, Vol 63, (March 1958) ACATE SPRINGS FOSSIL BEDS &quot;In Soux County, Nebraska, there is a hill called' 'Carnegie Hill' which has been formed by erosion of the level Nebraska prairie by the Nebraska River and its tributary streams. The hill was once an integral part 'of the entire Nebraska plateau and the horizontal layers are the same as the' layers in similar hills nearby. In that one hill 40 feet below the top, is a. horizontal layer 18 inches thick of jumbled remains of many thousands of complete, animals not now native to America, embedded in almost pure white limestone of which the hill and the plateau is composed. Such animals are found are: camels, giant pigs, rhinoceroses, and other exotic extinct animals all jumbled together in chaotic profusion and evidently Water laid. Dr. Velekovsky says of this fossil bed, &quot;The Carnegie museum, which likewise excavated in Agate Springs Quarry, in a space of 1350 square feet, found 164,000 bones or about 820 skeletons. This area represents only one-twentieth of the fossil bed suggesting that the entire area would yield:.16,400 skeletons of the twin-horned rhinoceros, 500 skeletons of the extinct clawed horse and 100 skeletons of the giant swine. A few miles to the east iin anther quarry, were found skeletons of an animal which because of its, similarity to two extant species, is called a gazelle camel. A herd of these animals was destroyed in a disaster and sand transported by water. The transportation was in a violent cataract of water sand and gravel that left marks on the bones. Tens of thousands of animals were carried over an unknown distance, then smashed into a common grave....( from Byron Nelson's After It's Kind , p.76 )

FOSSILS IN THE NORTHWEST UNDER THE LAVA BEDS In 1935 a cavity in the cliffs along the lower Grand Coulee in Washington State was found to contain miscellaneous fragmented bones and portions of teeth and jaws. These were identified as belonging to an extinct rhinoceros. This would not be unusual except that the cavity turned out to be the mold of the rhinoceros formed by pliable basalt that had covered. Basalt hot enough to be semi fluid would quickly destroy the body of an animal. The lava in this site was in pillow shaped masses more or less fused together around the body of the beast now disintegrated to the bones and teeth mentioned. Pillow lava is considered to have been molten basalt or lava flowed into water. No other fossils have been found in this region. The report of a mold of a rhinoceros in basalt seemed so ridiculous that a team of geologist from U. .California went to Grand Coulee to check on the report fragments of bones and teeth that were tentatively identified as perhaps as a pre-historic genus of rhinoceros. These men were convinced of its authenticity and concluded that the reason the animal was not destroyed by the great heat of the lava was because it lay in water which caused a formation of pillow lava. A plaster cast made showed the animal to have been bloated even folds of skin around the neck of the animal left their marks on the lava as shown by the plaster of paris cast.. .At a lower level a few hundred feet away, molds of large trees in both vertical and horizontal position can be seen. One of the upright tree molds is so large that a person can stand inside with outstretched arms and can scarcely touch the two walls. (from book Creation Accident or Design By Dr. Harold Coffin, p. 259 ) A summary is given by Alfred Rehwinkel: The Canadian geologist A. P. Coleman gives a vivid description of the animal life as it once existed in the present state of Iowa. He writes: 'With herds of wild horses, camels, and buffaloes on its prairies, trumpeting elephants of several sorts and sizes in the woods, and the Mylodon and Megalonyx toppling down saplings to feed on their leaves, conditions must have been decidedly interesting in the now peaceful state of Iowa. . . . More than three fourths of the mammals have since become extinct, but nearly all plants and the shellfish, as far as the species have been determined, still survive.&quot; Even in far-off Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, and the neighboring islands is found the same evidence of an all-destructive catastrophe which we have found elsewhere. The fossils found are numerous and varied in kind. The most interesting are the remains of the moa, an enormous wingless bird, similar to the ostrich but larger in size. Remains of this bird have been found in isolated spots at places 150 and 200 feet below the surface in beds of gravel and boulders, or they have been found in great caves where the remains of hundreds or thousands of these gigantic birds are heaped together in a confused mass. The occurrence of these masses of bones consisting of so many species of different habits, lying together with their bones intact, unrotted, and unbroken, suggests the same conclusion which has already forced itself upon us elsewhere. It is evident that these birds were driven together to high ground by rising water and finally perished and were buried there under masses of clay, gravel, and other debris. No other cause can offer a satisfactory explanation. Another type of fossils that might be mentioned here are the petrified forests found in many parts of the earth. Examples of such are celebrated fossil forests near Cairo, Egypt, the huge prostrate trunks in the Napa Valley, California, and the widely known Petrified Forest of Arizona. But probably even more remarkable than any other fossil forest are the petrified forests found in the Yellowstone National Park area.. But whatever the cause may be, the circumstances and conditions under which these rocky trees are found point to an upheaval of the earth's crust, so great that only a catastrophe of world wide extent can be contemplated . Mr. Knowlton observes that in the fossils found in Arizona, for example, the fossilized tree trunks

are scattered over many square miles of what is now almost desert. All the trunks show evidence of having been transported from distant parts before they were turned to stone. Most of them are not even in the position in which they were originally entombed, but have been eroded from slightly higher horizons and have rolled in the greatest profusion to lowlands. The appearance this presents is not unlike a so-called log drift that was left stranded by the receding waters. The Yellowstone Park district has large areas of petrified forests. One such area just outside the park covers about 35,000 acres. One of the largest petrified trunks found there is that of a redwood, still measuring ten feet in diameter. The matrix in which these trees are entombed consists of ashes, mud flows, and breccias, not all of equal texture as to hardness, all of which seems to point to volcanic activity and the action of water. About 150 kinds of fossils of other plants and remains of trees have been found in the same beds with these fossil trees. Among them are many kinds of ferns, the horsetails, smilax, a broadleaved banana-like plant, hickory nuts, chestnuts, figs, magnolias, laurels, cinnamon, sycamore, grapes, persimmon, ash, and many others, most of which no longer grow in that latitude or at the present altitude. The destructive agents here seem definitely to point to volcanic activity and water (from the book The Flood by Alfred Rehwinkel:) (Taken from book The Mystery of Atlantis by Charles Berlitz, 1975, Avon Books, N.Y., N.Y. ) &quot;Sir C. Wyville Thomson found that the specimens of the fauna of the coast of Brazil, brought up in his dredging machine, are similar to those of the western coast of Southern Europe. The continental shelf is the land near the shore that is still geologically part of the land continent before it shelves off into the depths of the sea and then levels out into what is called the Abyssal Plain. Examination of the depths of the continental shelves revealed that the beds of rivers which flowed into the Atlantic continued right on out along the shelf, sometimes going through canyons just as rivers erode through rock on land. This occurs with French, Spanish, North African, and American rivers flowing into the North Atlantic and continuing on the bottom along submerged river valleys until they reach a depth of 1 `/2 miles. It is especially striking in the case of the Hudson Canyon which extends the Hudson River bed through underwater cliffs for almost 200 miles to the edge of the continental shelf. It would seem to indicate that these river courses, now thousands of feet under the sea, were cut while that part of the continental shelf was dry land, and that either the land had sunk or the water had risen to cause this inundation of the river beds. A bulletin of the Geological Society of America (1936) commenting on these sunken river canyons suggests that such &quot;world wide lowering and rising of the sea level, amounting to more than 8,000 feet, must have occurred since the late tertiary age. . . .&quot; In other words, the Pliocene Period--the Age of Man. Another unusual discovery came about as the result of the breaking of a cable when the transatlantic cable was being laid in 1898, about 500 miles to the north of the Azores. While the cable was being searched for, the sea floor in this area was found to be composed of rough peaks, pinnacles, and deep valleys more reminiscent of land than of the sea bottom. Grappling irons brought up rock specimens from a depth of 1,700 fathoms which proved, upon examination, to be tachylyte--a vitreous basaltic lava which cools above water under atmospheric pressure. According to Pierre Termier, a French geologist who made a study of the incident, if the lava had solidified under water it would have been crystalline instead of vitreous. Termier further surmised that the lava had been submerged under water soon after cooling, as evinced by the relative sharpness of the material brought up. Moreover, as lava decomposes in about 15,000 years, the fact that the underwater lava specimens had not yet decomposed as well as the apparent above-water cooling, fit in extremely well with the theory of recent catastrophes. Termièr further states that &quot;. . . the entire region north of the Azores and perhaps the very region of the Azores, of which they may be only the visible ruins, was very recently submerged, probably during the epoch which the geologists call the present.&quot;

...Cave paintings in the Tassili Mountains of Algeria and the connected Accasus chain of Libya depict a pleasant, populated, fertile land of rivers and forests, teeming with all kinds of African animals once present but now vanished from an area as barren, at the present day, as the surface of the moon. Besides the indications of a complete climactic change suggested by the cave paintings, we see in their execution resemblances to those of prehistoric Europe, bearing witness to a developed culture and a long preparatory period of artistic development as indicated by the use of perspective and freeness of form. The presence of now-vanished game and a former large population fits in with the generally accepted theory that where there is now desert, large inland rivers and forests once existed and even inland seas. Remnants of these water courses still flow under the desert and the desert tribes still conserve the memory of more fertile lands. The gradual drying up of present day North Africa as well as the subsidence of much of the coast are the basis of other French theories predicating that both Tunisia and Algeria possessed an inland sea, opening to the Mediterranean and also connecting with the inner Sahara Sea. The inland sea of Tunisia is associated with Lake Tritonis, mentioned by several classical writers, which lost its water when the dikes burst during an earthquake and eventually dried up, becoming the present Shott el Djerid, a marshy, shallow lake in Tunisia. The Sahara itself is considered to be the bed of an ancient sea, part of the ocean. In Algeria and Tunisia geodetic surveys made by the French government showed that the depression formed by the Shotts (shallow, marshy lakes) of Algeria and Tunisia were below sea level and would fill up with water if a series of protective coastal dunes were removed.&quot; Animal fossils from the San Pedro Valley, California, present apparently anomalous faunal mixtures of much interest. Included are Miocene sharks, seals and porpoises, allegedly early Pleistocene sea-lions and land vertebrates, species of molluscs, sea-urchins, bryozoans and foraminifera which are still flourishing but unknown as fossils before Pleistocene times, and numerous late Pleistocene mammals and birds~. These are classic examples of `old' and `new' organisms coexisting in incompatible habitats or being assembled tumultuously and consigned to a common grave. Last century Prof P M Duncan, studying the Lake Titicaca basin of Andean Peru/ Bolivia, noted the existence of siluroid, cyprinoid and other marine fishes in the lake, and that corals attached to rocks underlying the extensive nitrate deposits along the presently waterless Peruvian coast west of the lake represent existing species. Today these corals lie 2,500--3,000ft (769--923m) above sea level. This region, however, which must once have lain much lower, is believed to have been well-wooded in the recent past and to have supported a rich and varied fauna. Numerous skeletons of forest-dwelling ant-eaters strewn across what is now the desert of Tarapaca eloquently testify to this. Some unexpected `late' occurrences of geologically `old' animals have been reported from equatorial Africa. For example, in 1931, a portion of an articulated skeleton of the Miocene elephant Deinotherium was found in `Pleistocene' deposits at Olduvai (Oldoway), Kenya, associated with shells of species still thriving in those latitudes. The skeleton occurred: &quot;...in conditions which preclude the possibility that it is derivative&quot;. Other Deinotherium bones and teeth had previously been observed near Ngeti close to the Ugandan border with the then Congo territories (Zaire) by the Belgian geologist Delpierre, in beds which: &quot;...on other evidence, he was convinced are of Pleistocene date. He affirmed, too, that these most unexpected fossils were not derived&quot;. More recently, further Deinotheriurn remains were retrieved from supposedly `early Pleistocene' beds near Teleki volcano, Kenya, along with bones of a Machairodont lion, a large mustelid, Hyaena cf namaquensis, a hare, Tatera, Hystrix, a mastodon, a primitive elephant, several pigs, an extinct rhinoceros, a horse (Stylohipparion), a hippopotamus, a large giraffe, an okapi, various bovines, two kinds of crocodile, three species of tortoise (one of great size) and numerous fishes. Recent reports and photographic records from an enclosed valley in the Nepalese Himalayas of a herd of living elephants apparently allied on the one hand to the Stegodon, a Pliocene and early `Pleistocene' Asiatic ancestor of the modern elephants, and on the other, to Stegomaston, a mastodont genus as yet certainly known only from the early Pleistocene of the Americas, suggest an even more interesting instance of late survival of an animal extinct elsewhere, and that `out-of-place' fossils like the Is-Shantün cave Miocene shark teeth and the

Deinotherium remains. Great natural convulsions must also have been responsible for the disposition of whales and other marine creatures on the crests of mountains in various other parts of California. Thus Hay quotes Dr Steven Bowers as stating: Bones of whales and other cetaceans are met with in various portions of the county [Ventura county], especially along the sides and crests o~ the Santa Paula mountains.

A Revised Geological Chronology

The diverse geological and biological evidence (fossil and extant) we have examined thus far converges on the fact that stupendous worldwide geophysical changes have occurred geologically very recently. It also highlights the fact that an impressive range of plant and animal forms (each identical or nearly so) now distributed discontinuously in different regions of the world represent floras and faunas so lately dislocated that insufficient time has elapsed for new species to have developed within their ranks. These changes were evidentially sudden and violent, the present topographical conditions in the world being their principal visible legacy -- and all living things the descendants of the animals and plants which survived them. The testimony of the fossils, moreover, reveals that biological decimations were wholesale and without regard to the biological classes, numbers, sizes, ages, sexes, or health of the victims. Many organisms perished literally where they stood, being suddenly buried erect or even in walking positions -- or were permanently frozen. with singular rapidity following their demise. Thus, not only these annihilations but also the deposition of many enveloping deposits (`drift') were catastrophically sudden. These deposits usually attributed to prolonged and massive iceaction, often overspread extensive tracts of land, ignoring preexisting topography -- and they are sometimes immensely thick. Their accumulation, therefore, occurred on a colossal scale, both in terms of volume and linear extent.

Extraordinary speed, huge scale, great violence and indiscriminate action are therefore equally prominent factors in both the geological and the biological records of the period inder review.

Typical `drift' deposits occur far outside allegedly glaciated regions, or, conversely, are absent from many others believed to have been heavily glaciated. Abnormally buried organic remains in otherwise typical `drift' deposits often occur in latitudes inimicable to large-scale ice-action. These are inescapable facts strongly militating against the popular explanation of the origin of these great deposits. As noted previously a special geological `period', the Pleistocene, was erected by geologists expressly to embrace these formations, on the basis of the real existence of these former glaciations. Since, however, ice-action is by nature very slow, the time allocated for these glaciations arid the resultant `drift' accumulations has been correspondingly long. Accordingly, it has been common to reserve a span of two or more million years for the duration of the Pleistocene `period'. Such concepts are seriously at variance with the field evidence, for if the glaciations of orthodoxy (the `Ice Age') never really existed, and if the singular `drift' deposits accredited to them were accumulated at comparatively great speed, then the duration of the Pleistocene epoch must actually have been unexpectedly brief. Repeated discoveries in `drift' deposits of mixed floras and faunas, simultaneously involve climatically-incompatible `northern' and `southern' species, modern and ancient biota, or forms which no longer flourish at the latitudes where their remains now occur. These loudly proclaim a sudden and violent extinction. The disposition of land and sea must also have differed markedly before the onset of these changes, and equally different meteorological conditions formerly existed, profoundly affecting the geographical distribution and general abundance of faunas and floras. With the elimination of an Ice Age of conventional conception, and observing that many supposedly typical `Ice Age' animals (eg, mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, etc) were not actually well adapted to glacial conditions, the faunas and floras found in Pleistocene `drift' deposits must

in reality have flourished during the preceding Pliocene period The generally equable conditions characteristic of Pliocene times were highly favourable to the development and proliferation of life-forms of all kinds, and in that respect did not materially differ from the equally genial Miocene period which preceded it. A mixture of ancient (Miocene) and less ancient (Pliocene) organisms -- including allegedly Arctic species -- thrived side by side, therefore, throughout Pliocene times, persisting until its brief, sudden and. cataclysmic close when, concomitantly with the deposition of the `drift', `they were slaughtered wholesale. For these reasons, typical Miocene and Pliocene species occur with surprising frequency alongside those of supposedly younger `Pleistocene' age, or figure alongside various specially adapted organisms now enjoying geographically discontinuous distribution. The occurrence of Miocene and Pliocene plants and animals, such as Deinotherium, Hipparion, Eumetopias, and Carcharodon, in late `Pleistocene' deposits, or the survival of various living animals and plants having comparably ancient origins, thus ceases to surprise. We know of no other scheme which satisfactorily or comprehensively accounts for such otherwise anomalous biological occurrences. Instead of being a distinct geological epoch of appreciable duration, the Pleistocene (as epitomised by the `drift' formations and attendant phenomena) appears therefore to have been little more than a rather brief `stage'. The time allegedly occupied by the glacial and interglacial episodes of conventional Pleistocene chronology was actually non-existent. Conversely, the Pliocene period persisted to very much more recent times than has hitherto been commonly supposed. The unique character of the `drift' deposits, the `erratics', and supposed glacial striations, however, is such that they merit a distinctive chronological `compartment'. The term `Pleistocene' is therefore retained as a `stage' rather than an `epoch' appellation,

Conflagration

The effects produced by a great world conflagration accompanying huge tectonic upheavals are graphically described in many traditions and written accounts, such as that bequeathed to us by Ovid. Ovid tells how a celestial body, called Phaeton, approaches Earth so that:the earth bursts into flame, the highest parts first, and splits into deep cracks, and its moisture is all dried up. The meadows are burned to white ashes; the trees are consumed, green leaves and all, and the ripe grain furnishes fuel for its own walls and vast conflagration reduces whole nations to ashes.

In his work Theogony, the classical Greek writer Hesiod clearly described the effects of this great conflagration which, preceding the Flood, was attributed to a celestial body called Typhon (another name for Phaeton). Another writer, Apollodorus, furnished further details stating that Typhon:...out-topped all the mountains, and his head often brushed the stars... Such and so great was Typhon when, hurling kindled rocks, he made for the very heaven with hissing and shouts, spouting a great jet of fire from his mouth... at Mount Haemus he heaved whole mountains.., a stream of blood gushed out of the mountain.

The Typhon legend was especially connected with pre-dynastic Egypt, where Typhon was also called Set, another name for the biblical Satan. The Roman writer, Pliny, described Typhon: A terrible comet was seen by the people of Ethiopia and Egypt, to which Typhon, the king of that period, gave his name; it had a fiery appearance and was twisted like a coil, and it was very grim to behold; it was not really a star so much as what might be called a ball of fire `. Strabo records that the Egyptian shore of the Red Sea was once called Typhonia. Interestingly, an old Arab tradition asserts that: &quot;...the Red Sea is simply water that did not dry up after Noah's Deluge&quot; Other effects produced by the great heat associated with this conflagration are common to many flood traditions. For example, from Persia, we have the statement that: &quot;The sea boiled, and

all the shores of the ocean boiled, and all of the middle of it boiled&quot;. The cause of this heating was ascribed to the `star' Tistrya, &quot;the leader of the stars against the planets&quot; -- note that more than one `star' is indicated; and it was accompanied by an incredibly violent hurricane. In another tradition, Tistrya: &quot;...let a stream of fire flow toward the earth... (and) filled our world with its devouring heat&quot;.

MOUNTAINS RAISED RECENTLY (From writings of Jonathan Gray) It is popularly speculated that mountain uplifts occurred over millions of years, until about a million years ago. But listen to the eminent geologist Bailey Willis, regarding the Asian mountains: &quot;The great mountain chains challenge credulity by their extreme youth.&quot; (Bailey Willis, Research in Asia. II, p.24)

On the former surf line of the raised beaches at Valparaiso, Chile, now at 1,300 feet, the seashells are not even decayed - a clear indication of a &quot;recent&quot; up thrust. Geologist J.S. Lee reports convincing evidence that &quot;the mountain ranges in western China have been elevated since the Glacial Age.&quot; (J.S. Lee, The Geology of China, p.207) In Kashmir, Helmut de Terra found deposits of a sea bottom at an elevation of 5,000 feet or more and tilted, at an angle of 40 degrees. And the shock is that:&quot;These deposits contain paleolithic [`Old Stone Age'] fossils.&quot; (Arnold Heim and August Gousser, The Throne of the Gods, An Account of the First Swiss Expedition to the Himalayas, p.218) Thus, the change occurred in human times, &quot;however fantastic changes so extensive may seem to a modern geologist.&quot; Citing extensive evidence, Immanuel Velikovsky concludes that &quot;the great massif of the Himalayas rose to its present height in the age of modern, actually historical man. . . With their topmost peaks the mountains have shattered the entire scheme of the geology of the `long, long ago'.&quot; (Velikovsky, Earth in Upheaval, p.76) A shock indeed! It can be demonstrated that the mountain chains of the Caucasus, China, Tibet, the Rockies, the Alps and the Andes all rose to their present heights in historical times. We have the same &quot;late&quot; dating from all parts of the earth. THE ANDES RANGE At 11,500 feet, a curious whitish streak runs along the side of the mountain range for over 300 miles. It is composed of the calcified remains of marine plants. This shows that these slopes were once part of the seashore.In fact, many lakes up in the Andes region are completely salt.One such lake is Titicaca. A watermark of salt along the lake shore now runs at an angle to the water level. Originally it must have been horizontal. Clearly the land was not only thrust up to its present altitude, but was tilted in the process. Not only is the water saline. On the beach of this lake high in the mountains, there are seashells as well as traces of seaweed. The lake must have been a bay or inlet of the sea. Even today, various sea creatures (including sea horses) survive in the lake Today this lofty, almost

sterile region is capable of sustaining only a scant population. Yet here we are confronted with a colossal mystery. Traces of a huge city lie at the southern side of the lake. In the fifteenth century, Spanish conquistador Cieca de Leon reported his astonishment at seeing ancient gateways hewn from solid stone 30 feet long and 15 feet high and pivoting. These ruins of Tiahuanaco, in Bolivia, are extensive. It is obvious that a great city once existed here. But here is the mystery. At an altitude of 13,000 feet, maize will not bear fruit. Yet endless agricultural terraces, now abandoned, rise as high as 18,400 feet above sea level, and continue up under the snow to some unidentified altitude. Such an abundance of cornfields must have supported a huge population. The region is too high and too barren to do this now. Could the site once have been lower? You see, if the Andes were 2- to 3,000 feet lower than now, maize would ripen around Lake Titicaca and the city of Tiahuanaco could support the large population for which it was evidently built.

ONCE A SEAPORT But here is an even greater surprise... the remains of an ocean quay. That's right, an ocean quay. It suggests that the city, when built, was at sea level - 12,500 feet lower! The remains near the stadium of Tiahuanacu show five distinct landing places, harbours with moles and a canal which heads inland. The docks are vast - and one wharf is big enough to take hundreds of ships. So we're faced now with a sea harbour at 12,500 feet altitude and 200 miles inland! Staggering, isn't it? Well, someone says, perhaps these gigantic docks were intended for ships on Lake Titicaca. Good try. But I'll tell you why not. You see, they face in the opposite direction from the lake. Not only that, the mooring rings on the stone piers were so large that they could only have been used by ocean-liner sized vessels. This place - I tell you - was a seaport on the Pacific coast. AND IT WAS THRUST, SO TO SPEAK, TWO MILES INTO THE SKY! Now, how about that? You've probably heard it said that mountain making took &quot;long ages&quot;. That in the case of the Andes (the second highest mountain range on earth), it occurred more than a million years ago. Well, I'm sorry to be a spoil sport. But the change in altitude occurred AFTER the city was built. I woul suggest about 4,000 years ago. And since only a few intermediate surf lines can be detected, the elevation could not have proceeded little by little. The explorer Colonel H.P. Fawcett, who travelled this region early last century, was persuaded by the evidence that Tiahuanaco had been destroyed by the terrible seismic upheavals which accompanied the raising of the Andes to their present height. (Fawcett, Exploration Fawcett: The Travel Diaries and Notes of Colonel H.P. Fawcett)

WORK INTERRUPTED There is some evidence that the monoliths of the city were not entirely finished when the catastrophe struck and suddenly raised the whole city and lake 12,500 feet. Cast-down builders' tools were found in the ruins when the Spaniards came upon the place in the 16th century. The heaps of blocks of masoned stone bear evidence of sudden abandonment... men fleeing for their lives, taken by surprise. After the disaster, the populace lay buried in gullies that had become mass graves, covered by silt. Fragments of skeletons, both of animals and men, lay scattered among the ruins. Jewels, pottery and tools were found mixed in utmost confusion. This massive uplifting exposed a continental shelf which is now the desert lowlands of Peru and northern Chile. WITNESSED BY SURVIVORS In the traditions of the Ugha Mongulala tribe of the western Amazon jungle, the South American continent was &quot;... still flat and soft like a lamb's back, ... the Great River still flowed on either side.&quot; But then came a cataclysm: &quot;The Great River was rent by a new mountain range and now it flowed swiftly toward the East. Enormous forests grew on its banks... In the West, where giant mountains had surged up, people froze in the bitter cold of the high altitudes.&quot; (Karl Brugger, The Chronicle of Akakor, 1977) Upswellings of other mountains may have been as violent. These were never forgotten by the inhabitants. For example, the Washo Indians of California say their ancestors witnessed the uplifting of the North American sierras from the plains. Various other tribes of the Americas likewise recall in their oral history the memory of new mountains being raised and others flattened. (Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, p.102)

RELIEF FROM STRESS CONTINUES After the Great Flood of 2345 BC, t took the earth's crust millennia to settle down. During the tectonic adjustments, lava continued to flow. Isolated areas of land were submerged or raised thousands of feet. Today these effects are being felt only to a comparatively minor degree. Still, it should be mentioned that even in modern times, the ocean has been known to raise or lower its islands or its depths, as much as thousands of feet. No need to invoke long evolutionary periods. THE EARTH'S SURFACE CAN CHANGE RAPIDLY. There are many recent examples of rapid up or down thrusts. LAND RISES 4,000 FEET - JUST LAST YEAR During the earthquake which occurred off the northern tip of Sumatra on December 26, 2004, the sea bottom in the Straits of Malacca uplifted almost 4,000 in only about 3 minutes.

The US-based National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyses spy satellite imagery and produces maps and charts for the Defence Department, was reported to have received information that one area of the Straits of Malacca, which separates Malaysia from the Indonesian island of Sumatra had its depth cut from 4,060 feet to 105 feet. In another affected area, a merchant marine ship logged that the depth was cut from 3,855 feet to just 92 feet. (Star newspaper, Kuala Lumpur, January. 13, 2005, quoting a report in the shipping journal Portsworld) The US Navy reportedly sent two ships to re-chart the waters. Sonar images from British navy ship HMS Scott showed the massive uplift of a large area 10 kilometres wide and up to 1.5 kilometres high (4,800 feet plus). Mountain Building Short

Geologists at Queen's University have discovered that the time it takes for mountain ranges to form is millions of years shorter than previously thought. This controversial finding could have implications for our understanding of other geological processes that shaped the Earth, says Professor James Lee and postdoctoral fellow Alfredo Camacho of Queen's Geological Sciences and Geological Engineering Department. The study will appear in the June 30 edition of the international journal Nature. Full story at http://www.physorg.com/news4885.html